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SUMMER IN ARCADY 



SUMMER IN ARCADY 



A TALE OF NATURE 



BY 



JAMES LANE ALLEN 

AUTHOR OF " FLUTE AND VIOLIN," " THE BLUEGRASS REGION 

OF KENTUCKY," "JOHN GRAY," "A KENTUCKY 

CARDINAL," " AFTERMATH," ETC. 



O Nature ! 

Some still work give me to do 
Only be it near to you ! 

THOREAU 



gorfe 
MACMILLAN AND CO. 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 
1896 

All rights reserved 



COPYRIGHT, 1896, 
BY MACMILLAN AND CO. 






J, S. Gushing & Co. - Berwick & Smith 
Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 



298643 



PREFACE 

THIS preface is a flag of war, here run up 
and set freely waving on the breastworks of 
this story. If any timorous stranger, approach 
ing it as an unknown fortress, should hesitate 
in foot and courage for lack of means to dis 
cover whether it were more prudent for him 
to advance or to retire, he will need but to glance 
up at these colours. They will acquaint him 
at once with the real nature of the forces en 
trenched behind ; with the spiritual country to 
which they belong; with the cause they have 
undertaken to defend. Should the knowledge 
thus gotten, reveal to him his unexpected near 
ness to the border-land of a friendly power, he 
is invited to enter the fort, to study the low 
earthworks, to inspect the smallish garrison. 
But if he choose to consider himself confronted 
by a foe, he is free to depart whither he will, 



viii Preface 

nor shall he be meanly fired upon as he turns 
his manly back. 

Our separate, wholesome, altogether peace 
ful and rather unambitious world of books, 
lying far off to itself on this side of the ocean, 
has of late suffered a twofold invasion from 
the literature of the mother-country, that has 
well-nigh swept every living American author 
away before it. These two armies of invading 
volumes have had little in common but a port 
of departure and a port of entry ; for while one 
has reached us as the forces of light benign 
and always welcome the other has spread 
abroad as the old and evil and ever-hated 
darkness. To those who understand, there is 
no need of plainer speech; to all others no 
need of speech at all. We know them too 
well these black, chaotic books of the new 
fiction know what unhealthy suggestions they 
have courted, what exposures of the eternally 
hidden they have coarsely made, what ideals 
of personal depravity they have scattered broad 
cast, what principles of social order they have 
attacked, what bases of universal decency they 



Preface ix 

have been resolute to undermine. There is 
hardly a thing of value to the normal portion 
of the race, in its clean advance toward higher 
living, that they have not in effect belittled or 
insulted ; there is scarce a thing that the long 
experience of the race has condemned and 
tried to cast off from itself as an element of 
decay, that they have not set upon with ap 
proval and recalled to favour. 

It is against this downward-moving fiction 
of manifold disorder that the writer has vent 
ured to advance a protest under cover of a 
story a story, he is too well aware, that could 
not possibly carry with it the weight and meas 
ure of an opposing argument, but that should 
at least contain the taste and quality of health 
ful repudiation. To this end, and with the 
use of the weapons put into his hands, he has 
taken two robust young people in the crimson 
flush of the earliest summer of life; they are 
dangerously foref athered ; they are carelessly 
reared; they are temptingly environed; they 
are alone with one another and with Nature; 
and Nature, intent on a single aim, directs all 



x Preface 

her power against their weakness. The writer 
has thus endeavoured to charge this story with 
as much peril as may be found in any of the 
others even more ; he has ventured to lay 
bare some of the veiled and sacred mysteries 
of life with no less frankness than they have 
used, but using, as he hopes, full and far greater 
reverence ; and, nevertheless, from such a situ 
ation he has tried to wrest a moral victory for 
each of the characters, a victory for the old 
established order of civilized societies, and a 
victory for those forces of life that hold within 
themselves the only hope of the perpetuity of 
the race and the beauty of the world. Such 
and so far runs the plan and hoped-for mission 
of his work. 

But furthermore : no man has ever sat 
gravely and sincerely down to study the lights 
and shadows of our common human destiny, 
desiring to transfer these in the due proportion 
of reality to the creations of his art, without 
sooner or later being driven to perceive that 
into nearly all the lights falls one dark ray 
from one great shadow, the greatest shadow 



Preface xi 

of the world, its outcast women. This story 
has been sent very near to the old, old path 
way that has always been trodden and is trod 
den to-day by these, alas ! wandering, innumer 
able ones ; and the writer has cast it in that 
direction with the utmost desire that it might 
do some good in this way: 

If any mother should read this account of 
the life of a partly irresponsible girl, whose 
own mother had failed to warn her of the 
commonest dangers, had neglected to guard and 
guide her feet to the knowledge that may mean 
safety, it will haply arouse in her the question 
whether she herself is giving the needed warn 
ings, throwing forth the proper guard, lending 
the upward guidance ; for how much of the 
world s chief tragedy lives on and on for the 
simple lack of these ? 

If any father should read this story of 
temptation and struggle in two children, he 
might perhaps order his own life the better for 
having had the truth brought home to him, that 
whenever he weakens the moral fibre of his 
nature, he may be weakening as well not only 



xii Preface 

the moral fibre of a son, but what is far 
more terrible and pitiful in the judgment of 
the world the moral fibre of his own daughter, 
yet unborn ; for it is true that the fallen women 
of the race are in a measure set apart to that 
awful doom by the inherited immorality of 
their fathers. 

If any girl, alone in the world, having no 
mother or counsellor of any kind, alone with 
her youth, her innocence, her beauty, perhaps 
her poverty as well and the need of hard 
work, not in the country chiefly, but rather 
in the vast city, in the treacherous town, if 
any such poor, undefended child should chance 
to read this story, she should bear in mind 
that its main lesson and most solemn warning 
are addressed to her : the lesson not to trust 
herself, the warning to trust no other, with 
out reservation blindly led on by love; or 
else, sitting lonely in her sorrow on her bed 
at midnight, she may come to know what her 
countless sisters have known, that even the 
purest love can do wrong, can betray, can be 
betrayed. 



Preface xiii 

If many a man should read this story 
married or unmarried, younger, older who 
has resolutely set his feet in the pathway of 
right living, there is nothing here to tempt 
them thence ; if they are straying elsewhither, 
there are some things here that might well 
follow after him, if not with the power to 
recall, at least as a memory to rebuke ; for 
he has found set forth in these pages the 
case of a boy, who, being greatly wronged by 
a past beyond his reach and associates beyond 
his control, nevertheless did struggle upward 
into something better than he had been, so 
winning his happiness in one woman at last, 
as men must always win it, by rising to it 
as something that stands above them, never go 
ing down to it as something that waits below. 



SUMMER IN ARCADY 



PRELUDE 

SILENTLY summer waxes. The first wave 
of warmth trembles northward, pauses, flees 
back, is gone; but it has left an imperishable 
touch on thousands of delicate things as a 
glacier scars the rocks. Another wave, more 
heated, more vitalizing, creeps forward; even 
while advancing, it has died away amid the 
common chill. Then follow the sunlit break 
ers, running faster and farther toward the 
changeless coast of the North, until over the 
entire gentle zone settles one deep, tranquil, 
crystalline, perfumed sea. 

Some day far out on this rockless ocean of 
air a solitary craft may be seen drifting a 
gay little barge of two sails that seem woven 
of sunlight. From what port can it have 



in Arcady 



started ? Whither is it bound ? What mar 
iner holds it in charge ? With what freight 
may it be laden for the good of the world ? 
Turn your best glass upon it : you will never 
answer. No pilot stands on board ; cargo there 
is none ; of how it was built and where launched 
no hint is given ; it changes its course at every 
point, and can be meant to reach no port at 
all: the most fragile and daring of earthly 
cruisers, careening fearfully to the one side or 
the other under the lightest breeze, like a yel 
low leaf on the slow winds of autumn. 

By and by, in another part of the ocean, 
you observe a second vessel, fashioned like the 
first. Later, several; at last a fleet without 
number. No bay of the earth was ever so 
crowded with human sail. What can it mean 
this warm sea of air crossed and recrossed 
at every parallel and meridian by rolling and 
rocking yellow-sail ships ? 

Two that have had naught to do with their 
own build and launch are drifting far apart, 
unknown to each other. Borne nearer, some 
day they pass within signal range; but there 



Summer in Arcady 3 

is no salute : what do they care ! Another 
day they crash into each other and are hard 
put to it to draw unharmed asunder; but they 
are not friends, they are not enemies : each 
steers calmly on. Before the summer is gone, 
however, and at the instant of Nature they 
come within hailing distance again. Now they 
rush together. The meeting of zephyrs could 
not be more soft; the onset of ironclads could 
not be more resolute. Out of that countless 
fleet they think of each other alone. To them 
the ages gone, the ages to come, are nothing; 
their one moment is eternity; the whole uni 
verse was created for the sake of their love. 
Eager, winnowing wings, built up so airily of 
a distant sunbeam and a few grains of dust! 
Weightless little bodies, heavy with Love ! How 
they ride the blue billows of air, circling, pursu 
ing, mounting higher and higher, the first above 
the second, the second above the first; then 
whirling downward again, and so ever fleeing 
and seeking, floating and clinging, blindly, 
helplessly, under the transport of all-compelling, 
unfathomable Nature ! 



4 Summer in Arcady 

As the end of it all, the two lash themselves 
together and go wandering by as one, or as one 
they come to stillness on the nearest blossom. 

Not long afterwards the darkened, roughened 
sea of air is filled with another fleet snow- 
flakes; and the wee yellow-sail ships of sum 
mer, where are they then ? 

Can you consider a field of butterflies and not 
think of the blindly wandering, blindly loving, 
quickly passing human race ? Can you observe 
two young people at play on the meadows of 
Life and Love without seeing in them a pair 
of these brief moths of the sun ? 



THE warmth of June had settled over Ken 
tucky, and yellow butterflies were thick along 
her path that day as Daphne crossed the sweet 
green fields. 

She had not yet reached eighteen, and she 
was like the red-ripeness of early summer fruit 
where of late were white blossoms. A glance 
at her lithe, round figure, the unusual womanly 
development of which always attracted secret 
attention and caused her secret pain, could 
have made many a mother reflect upon the 
cruel haste with which Nature sometimes forces 
a child into maturity, and then adds to the peril 
of its life by covering it with alluring beauty. 

Briskly she walked on, humming tunefully ; 
now and then lifting her rustling, snow-white 
petticoats high over the sheep and cattle traces 
in her path, and watchful lest she be tripped 
and thrown. For the bluegrass and the tongue- 
5 



6 Summer in Arcady 

grass and plantain and dog-fennel, growing 
along those byways that braid the rich meadows, 
soon mingle unless torn apart by passing feet ; 
and she remembered that she was unfortunate 
about stumbling. So that her thoughts were 
wholly concerned with the safety of the small 
basket of eggs she was carrying. 

Once she paused. A young farmer was 
singing in his field of corn not far away. It 
was a warm voice, pouring itself out in bold, 
glad unconcern of everything and everybody. 
She listened a moment, and then hurried on : 
neither the song nor the singer meant anything 
to her. 

And nothing to Daphne, likewise, were the 
other wayside sights and sounds that morning. 
The eternal archway of blue, crossed by slow 
white clouds ; the south wind playing with the 
hair on the back of her neck; the whole outlook 
of that green, quiet, sunlit land ; plain, sturdy 
homesteads of brick lying about the horizon ; 
motherly old orchards that had been the com 
fort of cellar and fireside for many a wintry 
year; fields of grain bending northward in 



Summer in Arcady J 

long, shadowy, golden waves ; red cattle grazing 
knee-deep on distant hillside pastures; the 
meadow about her set thick with violets and 
dandelions ; the yellow-breasted lark springing 
up before her with a long silvery salute ; the 
Kentucky warbler rising and falling through 
his low plane of feeding these and the whole 
vast interwoven realm of Nature s influences 
were as nothing to her. And yet it was Nature 
that now drove Daphne swiftly onward along 
with orchard and cattle, grain, insect, and weed, 
to what we love pompously and ignorantly to 
call in human life the great hours of destiny. 



II 

THE meadow was separated from the corn 
field by a high staked-and-ridered fence. Along 
the fence at irregular intervals grew locust- 
trees a familiar feature of the Kentucky fields. 
Had you climbed to the top rail and sat under 
the shade of one of these, as he often did, you 
would have seen coming down the corn-row 
toward you the young man, or boy, who had 
been singing. 

He was in loose cowhide boots, into the tops 
of which he had stuffed his blue cotton trousers ; 
his white cotton shirt was opened down the 
bosom, so that the cool breeze might blow in 
and keep him cool. It blew in now, showing 
his deep, clean, beautiful chest, and causing the 
shirt to bend out from his broad, flat back like 
a little bellying sail. His shirt and trousers were 
girt tightly about his waist; around his neck 
he had tied a handkerchief with a pink border ; 
8 



Summer in Arcady 9 

and set well forward over his clear, careless 
eyes was a broad-brimmed hat of coarse straw, 
with a hole in the crown. A heavy-limbed, 
heavy-built, handsome young fellow of about 
nineteen, with a yellowish mustache just fairly 
out on a full red lip that had long been impa 
tient for it. 

The old horse kept his gait up and down the 
rows as evenly as though urged along by the 
pressure of steam ; it would have been as likely 
for an alarm whistle to have blown off through 
one of his ears as for him to have stepped by 
mistake on a hill of corn ; the corn itself was 
still too young for him to bite and so need a 
watchful curb; the share parted the furrow 
through a soil without clods or stones to roll 
over on the brittle shoots ; so that with one 
hand lightly guiding the plough handle and the 
noose of his plough-line around his other wrist, 
what was there to keep the boy from singing ? 
And of what should he sing at nineteen, in the 
month of June, with the gold of the sun on his 
face and its flame in his blood ? 

Once, as he reached the edge of the field 



io Summer in Arcady 

and swung his plough from the furrow into the 
next, he caught sight of a blue figure moving 
away along the meadow path. He dropped 
everything, and stepping over to the fence, 
leaned heavily and lazily upon it, watching 
in dead silence. To his gross instincts any 
thing in the shape of a woman was worth 
gazing after, even at long range, especially 
a woman alone. But beyond this passion his 
face betrayed no interest. The blue figure 
became smaller, bearing away with it through 
the quivering heat the fragrance and fresh 
ness of a hyacinth, and he returned to his 
plough and to his singing. 



Ill 

DAPHNE stepped out into the front porch 
of her father s house near ten o clock the 
next morning with the empty basket in her 
hand : it gave her a pretext to go back to her 
aunt s ; and to Daphne on this day anything 
was better than staying at home. 

The houses were about a mile and a half 
apart as a crow flies. They were connected 
by a carriage and wagon road and by a foot 
path ; and even before Daphne was born this 
foot-path had become a little highway for the 
passage of creams and jellies, butter, fruit, 
vegetables, and the thousand more things, eat 
able, wearable, or otherwise usable that may 
be sent to and fro between friendly house 
holds in a remote country neighbourhood. 

From childhood one house had been as 
nearly her home as the other. She had 
moved contentedly backward and forward be- 
ii 



12 Summer in Arcady 

tween them, much as a pith-ball between two 
batteries ; which, on being made negative, re 
turns to be made positive ; and having become 
positive, returns to be made negative again ; 
and so on endlessly. 

But during the last year or two, for reasons 
of which she knew nothing but of which 
Nature could have given a reasonable account, 
the pith-ball had begun to be jerked about in 
the most violent, irregular manner, under dis 
turbances from another quarter, and the two 
batteries no longer held it in rhythmic peace : 
the child had become a woman, and there 
was no longer any one in either household to 
make her happy. 

Some evidence of this complete discontent 
could have been gathered from the manner 
in which she had now paused on the steps of 
the porch, undecided whether to go or not, 
and looking with disapproval at the green 
landscape quivering with crystal heat. 

The little brown porch had large white pil 
lars, and over these had been trained a queen- 
of-the-prairie rose-bush. This hung heavy with 



Summer in Arcady 13 

bloom now, and there was the sound of dron 
ing inside the petals. Two bees rolled angrily 
out of a rose just over her head and she 
started aside ; then going down the steps to 
an old calycanthus-bush of rare sweetness, 
she gathered several half-blown buds, and put 
ting them into her bosom passed dreamily out 
of the yard. 

She crossed the stable lot, full of dog- 
fennel and June-bugs, where the short-horn 
calves stayed, her father made a specialty 
of young steers, passed through a woodland 
pasture where the short-horn cows stayed, 
and began to cross a meadow where there 
were Southdown sheep. 

If you can imagine a pond as growing to 
hate its smooth surface and wishing that the 
ducks and geese would all come wabbling 
down the hill, a pond so lonesome in its 
way that it would be thankful for a few frogs 
at nightfall, you will understand Daphne s 
state of mind as she strolled across the 
meadow swinging in both hands the basket 
to which she gave idle, vicious little kicks 



14 Summer in Arcady 

with her knees. Nothing better in the way 
of pleasure was within her reach than to 
have gone back to the calf-lot, caught a June- 
bug in the dog-fennel, and tied a thread to 
its leg merely for the excitement of hearing 
it buzz around, and of dodging when it darted 
at her with its prickly feet. 

But to be satisfied with insects was not for 
such as Daphne. Once she did stoop down 
in the path to look closely at a most gorgeous 
dot of moving scarlet; and becoming inter 
ested, pulled a plantain and let the insect 
crawl on it and studied it. Her eyes were 
ravished with its splendour. A robe like that 
perhaps no queen had ever worn. What was 
the use of making such a thing so beautiful ? 
And what was it doing in this big meadow 
all by itself ? Daphne s thoughts on human 
life were not of a kind to have filled the 
note-book of Epictetus, or made Solon walk 
the floor for envy; but as she threw it away 
with a sigh she asked herself one mighty 
question : Why, in a world so full of people, 
should she be crossing the meadow without 
a companion ? 



Summer in Arcady 15 

Look to the right or to the left, only two 
things gave the slightest relief to her green 
world of loneliness : on one side the sheep ; 
on the other the figure of the young farmer 
whose land adjoined her father s. He was 
resting on the top rail of the fence under a 
locust-tree, and was watching her with his 
hat in his hand; and once, as she looked 
that way, he put it on and took it off again 
with a movement that said "good morning," 
said it with cordial good-nature. All at 
once, full of cordial, gay good-nature herself, 
Daphne took off her hat and waved it in re 
turn, laughing because she felt that he must 
be laughing also ; and immediately the world 
became a different sort of place in which 
something does happen. The next time she 
looked at him he waved his handkerchief 
it was pretty wet; so that Daphne drew out 
her fresh handkerchief from beneath her belt 
and waved it. Then he put his hands up to 
his mouth in the shape of a conch and 
shouted several words to her. She called 
back that she could not hear. He shouted 



1 6 Summer in Arcady 

again. And she again. Then he again. 
Then she no more; but with a gesture of 
impatience she pursued her way. 

But she wished that she had heard. He 
had tried very hard to make her hear. And 
she looked again, thinking that if he cared to 
come across and walk beside her, and tell 
her, she would wait for him. But he had 
gone back to his work. 

" Are you going to the picnic ? " 
This was all that he had said; and as he 
started down the corn-row, he whacked the 
old horse with the plough-line in a growing 
hope that he would meet her there. 



IV 

DAPHNE was kept at home during the next 
two days, with helping her mother make 
cherry preserves ; and on the third day they 
had a roll for their twelve-o clock dinner 
which would be the last of the season. 
After dinner she started to take a slice of it 
to her grandmother. 

When she entered the meadow this time, 
she looked eagerly toward the row of locust- 
trees. There were seven of them from one 
end of the field to the other, and not a man 
under any tree. She began to feel fretful 
and sorry that she had come, and all at once 
she remembered how she hated to see her 
grandmother eat anything soft with her dry, 
withered, nimble little mouth. And then rid 
ing down the path toward her she saw Hil 
ary, sitting sideways on the back of his 
horse. 

c 17 



1 8 Summer in Arcady 

He was returning from his dinner, and he 
was crossing the upper edge of the meadow 
to a pair of bars which opened into his field. 
But his roving eyes had lighted upon her, 
and with the idea of talking to her about the 
picnic he had turned his horse s head into 
the path. And since the old horse crept 
sleepily along in one direction and the child, 
now very wide awake, moved straight on in 
the other, they presently came together, nose 
to nose. 

"You needn t pretend that you don t see 
me ! " cried Daphne. She was radiant and 
laughing. 

" I m not looking at you, am I ? " He had 
not turned his head. 

"Very well; you needn t look. But get 
out of the path." 

"/ m not in the path." 

Daphne put her plate down resolvedly on 
the grass, closed her parasol, rested her hand 
on the horse s nose, tipped off his hat, picked 
it up and sent it whirling through the air, 
and taking her dumpling, sailed round him 



Summer in Arcady 19 

in triumph. She was greatly pleased with 
what she had done. In secret she was even 
more pleased with what he had done. 

She heard his low laughter behind her, 
musical with good-nature, and she turned 
quickly and laughed back. 

"Ah, ha!" she cried. "That s what you 
get for your impudence." 

"Yes," he said lazily, after looking at her 
for a moment, " and what ought you to get 
for yours ? " 

He leaned over toward her, resting his 
elbows on the broad, fat back of the horse, 
with his chin in his palms. The sunlight fell 
on his yellowish hair and on his strong, 
bronzed face and neck; and his whole out 
stretched body lay basking as restfully as 
though asleep on a silvery white rug. She 
stood with a blue parasol on her shoulder, as 
though a strip of the lovely vault above had 
come down and arched itself over her head. 
Its shadow brought out the whiteness of her 
clear, firm skin, now moist with heat, the 
peony-like flush of her cheeks, the chestnut 



2O Summer in Arcady 

brown of her soft, thick hair, braided in two 
long plaits down her back. Her fresh lips 
parted slightly from her teeth like a crimson 
bow. Her bosom was rising and falling with 
her quickened breath. The warm odour of 
calycanthus buds stole outward. In all that 
Nature could do she was a challenge. His 
nostrils quivered, he slowly stretched his 
limbs, and his eyes filled with something 
warmer than sunlight. 

"And what ought you to get for yours?" 
he repeated. Then sitting up, he called to 
her keenly : 

"Stand still, Daphne! There s a bee com 
ing to sting you." 

One day when a child, up in the garret 
where she kept her china, Daphne had es 
pied a gray object that looked a little like a 
honeycomb and a little like a spider-web, and 
she had put up an inquiring hand and pulled 
down a hornet s nest. There is apt to be a 
point about such things that keeps them re 
membered. 

She now raised her shoulders to the back 



Summer in Arcady 21 

of her neck, shut her eyes, and drew her scar 
let lips apart. 

"Quick!" she cried. "Kill it!" 

He slipped down and kissed her, not very 
quickly, snatched her hat and was up again. 

"You can open your eyes," he said 
quietly. " The bee s gone." 

They were open wide open and the 
breath was all but out of her body. 

He had put her hat on one side of his 
head and was laughing down at her in an 
unconcerned way, except for a look of roguish 
mischief. There passed through her mind 
like a scorching flash the remembrance of 
what she had heard about his ways with 
girls, and the colour began to leave her face. 
She could not even say, " How dare you ! " 
He had dared so often already. That point 
seemed settled. 

"Give me my hat," she said instinctively. 

He nodded toward his, lying far out on 
the grass. 

"You go pick up mine," he replied, laugh 
ing. 



22 Summer in Arcady 

She did not know that the vines and leaves 
of her hat brought out in his head and face 
a likeness to Bacchus; but its influence drew 
her : it was daring, dangerous, rudely beauti 
ful with the warmth of earth and vine and 
sun ; and she cried out with a new pain in her 
anger : 

" How dare you try to kiss me as you do 
other girls ? " 

" I don t kiss other girfs," he answered, 
laughing carelessly just as before. " Only 
you." 

With the instinct that prompts women when 
excited to put their hands to their hearts, 
she was pressing the tilted plate against her 
bosom, and the sauce had begun to trickle 
down the front of her dress. 

" Look at you there ! " he cried. " Don t 
waste that sauce." 

When she glanced down and saw what 
had happened, the indignities and misfortunes 
of the occasion were too much for her reck 
less, passionate temper ; and gathering her 
self up for a mighty effort, she pitched the 



Summer in Arcady 23 

dumpling at his head. He dodged, but some 
of the flying sauce struck his cheek; it glis 
tened as though coated with gum arabic. 

" Look at you ! " he shouted again, " a-spoil- 
ing my clean shirt and a-gorming me up like 
a baby." 

But Daphne was on her way home, bare 
headed, defeated, and full of the further irri 
tation that comes from sticky garments. 

When she had gone about twenty paces, he 
called after her : 

" Here s your parasol." 

She walked on. 

"Here s your hat." 

She took no heed. 

" Here s your dumpling." 

Daphne would not have laughed for the 
world. 

" Here s pretty much everything." 

Daphne answered with two or three tears, 
and put up one hand to shield her eyes from 
the glare of the sun. 

"You ll get sunstruck if you walk home 
that way." 



24 Summer in Arcady 

There was a change in his voice, and she 
noted it. She put up both hands. 

" I ll bring you your parasol if you ll say, 
Please, Marster. " 

Daphne now saw unexpected victory ahead. 
She took out her handkerchief and made a 
little white sunshade of it with many signs 
of how hard a thing it was to do. 

" Good-by ! " His voice came with increas 
ing penitence. 

The end was nigh and Daphne was re 
solved that he must not see she had been 
crying : she took down the white umbrella 
and secretly wiped her eyes. 

"Hello! Hold on there! Where are you 
going?" He was in dead earnest now. 

Daphne thought to herself that she had 
managed this very well. 

There followed a minute of silence and 
then she heard him say, "Get up, here!" 
and heard the old horse groan aloud at 
being kicked on both sides for no earthly 
reason known to him. Then behind her, 
getting louder and louder, she heard the 



Summer in Arcady 25 

rattle of the hames and the jangle of the 
trace chains. 

Like many another woman, she felt that 
she must appear a terrible being in the 
presence of the man she had conquered. He 
must be made to realize what a vast power 
he had feebly attacked. But like many an 
other woman, she was in doubt as to the 
terms on which she meant finally to make 
peace and as to the amount of her war debt. 
And then, human nature, while it knows how 
to act when wronged in one particular, be 
comes confused when offended in several 
being much like a crow that can count one 
or two, but gets dreadfully puzzled over five 
or six. So many things had happened to 
Daphne that she was not sure how to itemize 
her indignation. Under the circumstances, 
instinct told her that it would be better not 
to say anything at all that a stubbornly 
silent, angry-looking woman is a power hard 
to reckon with. 

"Are you mad? * 

He had jumped off the horse and was 



26 Summer in Arcady 

walking in the grass beside her, and looking 
round into her face, bareheaded, smiling. 

She made him no answer. 

" I couldn t help it, Daphne. It wasn t the 
first time, you know; and I had never for 
gotten. How could I forget ? " His tone 
was very gentle and apologetic and affec 
tionate. 

Daphne remembered instantly that once in 
a game of thimble, when it had been his turn 
to do the kneeling and the bowing and the 
kissing, he had kissed her ; for no other rea 
son really than that she was the nearest girl 
to him and he had not then lost his bash- 
fulness. But such speeches have their effect. 
Daphne reduced her war debt one-half. 

" We are no longer children," she remarked 
with dignity. 

" That s all the more reason I couldn t 
resist," he replied insinuatingly. 

" Say you are not mad," he added, as she 
made no further reply. 

She gave him one look to show him how 
angry she was. 



Summer in Arcady 27 

" I knew you were not mad/ he cried, read 
ing her through and through, and bursting 
into a laugh. 

Daphne now began to get angry in earnest, 
and he saw it. 

" Very well, then," he said, " I m going to 
stay with you till you get in a good humour 
again." 

He raised the parasol and held it over her. 
The plate was in his other hand and her hat 
dangled from his elbow. And then in a gay 
undertone, as if wholly to himself, he began to 
sing: 

" O, there was a little boy who worked in the corn, 

And a little girl who played in the hay ; 
And he was alone and she was alone. 
O, they lived to see their wedding-day. 

" O, the little boy cried : * Come play in my corn! 

But the little girl she cried : &lt;Nay! 
And he worked on and she played on. 
O, they lived to see their wedding-day." 

He stopped singing and thrust his face 
around in front of hers again, with an inquir- 



28 Summer in Arcady 

ing smile. But he got no smile from her, so 
he went on : 

" O, the little girl cried : l I m afraid of your corn! 

So you come play in my hay! 
The little boy sped but the little girl fled. 
O, he caught her on their wedding-day. 

" O, all of you little boys out in the corn, 

And you little girls out in the hay, 
May you play and work together in the right kind 

of weather. 
O, may you see your wedding-day ! " 

They had reached the meadow bars as he 
finished. He stopped abruptly. 

" Here are your things," he said, handing 
them to her with quiet authority. " I must go 
back to my work now. Good-by ! Be sure to 
be at the picnic," he added kindly as he turned 
away. 

She stood rooted to the spot and watched him 
as he went back to his horse and rode away 
sidewise through the sunlight, singing, and 
without once glancing back at her. Then she 
started home, wounded and excited as she had 
never been. 



IN Kentucky June is the season for picnics in 
the woodland pastures. The skies are fairest 
then. The earth has the perfect beauty of the 
young summer. The big oaks and walnuts and 
maples cast their round shade heavy with new 
leaves. The breezes blow sweet with the scent 
of fields never far away, sweet with the odour of 
crushed grass. The warm-eyed, bronzed, foot- 
stamping young bucks forsake their plough 
shares in the green rows, their reapers among 
the yellow beards ; and the bouncing, laughing, 
round-breasted girls arrange their ribbons and 
their vows. It is the Arcady of that passionate 
land and people. It is the country dance of 
merry England, full of love and mischief, that 
was danced by our forefathers centuries ago, is 
danced to-day on Kentish greens, and is destined 
to be danced for hundreds of years to come 
29 



3O Summer in Arcady 

among these unchanging Southern children of 
the mother-land. 

That June Nature appeared in a dream to a 
young farmer of the neighbourhood. The next 
day he rode up the turnpike and down the lane, 
inviting everybody to his picnic. But Nature 
really issued the invitations. She said to the 
young women : " The young men will be there 

that is all you need to know;" and to the 
young men : " The young women will be there 

and that is all you need to know." And 
then she reflected further within herself: 
" These blindfolded children ! They think they 
are giving a picnic : they do not see that it is 
mine. They do not look around them and 
behold with terror how I have called back to 
me nearly all their grandfathers and grand 
mothers ; that I am about done with their 
fathers and mothers ; and that their whole land 

these rich old homesteads, these fields with 
herds and flocks, these crops, and orchards, and 
gardens would soon become a waste unless I 
gave picnics and the like, from which I always 
gather fresh generations and keep things going, 
/will be at this picnic." 



Summer in Arcady 31 

The morning of the dance came. The dew 
was hardly off the grass when into the woods hur 
ried the young bucks on horseback, or in their 
new, or newly washed, buggies, with their radi 
ant partners. But there were rockaways also 
with other girls sitting beside their mamas 
those mamas who know how to take occasion 
by the foretop and who help Nature wonder 
fully with the origin of man. 

Down the lane, not far away, the ring of a 
hammer ceased, and the negro blacksmith, hav 
ing washed his hands and arms in the huge tub 
where he cooled his irons, locked the smithy 
door. Horse and mare and colt were to go 
unshod that day. They set a table under a 
sugar-tree, set a chair on the table, set the 
fiddler in the chair, set a pitcher of ice-water 
at his feet, and told him to strike while the iron 
was hot. He took a long, deep, contemptuous 
draught, struck a shower of musical sparks 
from his fiddle, hitched his chair so as to face 
a rectangular space where the sod had been 
removed and sawdust sprinkled, fixed his eye 
on the roof of green boughs covering it, and 



32 Summer in Arcady 

became lost to all further companionship with 
the human race. 

" Go it, my children ! " said Nature, looking 
on. " Dance away ! Whatever is natural is 
right." 

" Yes," said the Devil, who also attends pic 
nics. "Go it, my children! Whatever is 
natural is right." 



VI 

DAPHNE awoke that morning with the dawn 
and the birds and the thought of the picnic. 
After breakfast, as he was leaving the house, 
she found courage to ask her father to let her 
go. He refused; he was an elder in the 
church, she a member. It was no place for 
her. 

All the forenoon she sat in the front porch 
near the droning of bees in the honeysuckles 
and the roses, looking across the bright fields 
toward the dark domes on the horizon under 
which she knew they were dancing. Once she 
slipped off in the direction of her aunt s. 
When she came to the meadow bars where two 
days before she had seen him riding away, she 
looked across at the locust-trees. No one was 
sitting there. She bent her ear, listening. No 
one was singing in the corn-field. How unutter 
ably deserted and silent the earth was! Very 
D 33 



34 Summer in Arcady 

slowly she went back to the porch and sat 
there. 

Little things often determine the future of a 
girl, as the push of a finger will start a great 
rock down a mountain with ruin to everything 
in its path. During those hours Daphne took 
account of her life as never before, and the 
account consisted mainly of the things she had 
against her father. There were days when she 
hated him : this was one. 

Two heroic necessities make up a large part 
of our life : to be made to do what we dislike, 
and to be withheld from doing what we desire. 

Early in childhood, Daphne s spirit had been 
broken to the first. No day passed without 
unpleasant duties ; but these were so many 
burdens originating outside her own nature and 
laid upon her by those she loved ; and for the 
bearing of other people s burdens, she had 
quick, warm sympathies, and would in time, 
perhaps, come to have the true womanly endur 
ance. But life had no power of teaching her 
submission to the second of these hardships. 
The older she grew, the more passionate be- 



Summer in Arcady 35 

came her rebellion at ever being thwarted. 
Whenever she could not have her own way 
altogether, she always went as far as possible 
toward the forbidden. And of the things that 
had been forbidden her in the whole course of 
her life, nothing had ever been so hard as the 
command to stay away from this picnic. The 
desire to be there smouldered in her like a fire. 

When her father came home at noon, she 
asked him again more boldly. He refused 
rudely; and after dinner, taking a pillow, he 
stretched himself on the long, green bench in 
the front porch, and told her to get the fine- 
tooth comb. It had been one of her duties 
when a little girl to be made to put him to sleep 
by combing the dandruff out of his hair while 
she was nearly dead for sleep herself. Some 
times her tears fell softly on his locks, and 
trickling over his brow had been understood by 
him as indications of his temperature. At 
other times she would deal him a fierce dig with 
the comb that awoke him with a tremendous 
wince and snort. 

But to-day she combed her father s hair with 



36 Summer in Arcady 

the softness women sometimes have that is so 
terrible to watch ; and the soft movement of 
her magnetic fingers about his temples put him 
quickly to sleep. Then Daphne crossed her 
hands in her lap and simply looked at him. He 
might well have had bad dreams. 

His nap over, as he was riding away from 
the stiles, he called to her carelessly to take 
the boys over to the picnic for a little while : 
they wanted to go. 

It was the middle of the afternoon, then, 
when into the woods rattled an old rock- 
away, driven by a little bareheaded negro 
with a pea-stick for a whip. Beside him sat 
two white boys smaller still, and on the seat 
behind sat Daphne. 

She had the negro drive to a distant fence- 
corner and got out unnoticed. When she ap 
proached the vehicles drawn up around the 
dancers, she searched until she found one 
that was vacant, and getting into it let the 
children go. They sped back to a hogshead 
of lemonade, which they had passed on the 
way, with a tin cup hanging low on the out- 



Summer in Arcady 37 

side from a twine string, and she was left 
alone. 

For a few minutes longer she indulged her 
angry, bitter thoughts against her father. He 
had a good buggy for himself; he was more 
than able to buy a new rockaway; instead, 
he made them keep on using the old one, 
which he varnished thickly over once a year 
at fair time. It rattled so loud on the turn 
pike that people could tell what was coming 
long before they could see what it was; and 
if she could help, she would never go to 
town in it except on rainy days when the 
spokes and hubs were swollen, and she could 
let down the side-curtains and sit far back 
inside. It was very dry weather now, how 
ever, and when they had turned out on the 
pike, and the little negro with a tremendous 
whack from his pea-stick had set things in 
violent motion, the sudden uproar the mor 
tification of having to go to the picnic in a 
sort of loosely jointed flying-machine had 
brought back the feelings with which she 
had been struggling all day. 



38 Summer in Arcady 

The rockaway in which Daphne, with Ken 
tucky frankness, had now taken her seat 
and sat pouting was new and stylish. It 
made her feel respectable ; and she might 
have been happier still if the family flying- 
machine, hidden behind the briers, could have 
caught fire from the trench near by in which 
they had barbecued the mutton, and been car 
ried off as sparks and smoke. She could now 
receive without mortification the attentions of 
the young men of her acquaintance who did 
not dance on account of being members of 
the church ; and Daphne knew also that it 
was not an unheard-of thing in a young man 
who did dance to prefer to sit with a girl in 
such an advantageous place. 

Still, it was only in a half-hearted way that 
she brightened up and began to talk to the 
people of the neighbourhood in their carriages 
near her. 

A middle-aged mother with a screaming 
baby in her arms got out of her carriage 
just ahead and hurried toward the rear. She 
caught sight of Daphne and called to her: 



Summer in Arcady 39 

"You here! Tell your father to look out 
for his black sheep Hilary s been dancing." 

Hilary dancing ! And now her father would 
have him up before the church! By and by 
the mother repassed. 

"Whom has he been dancing with ?" asked 
Daphne, in a voice faint and cold. 

"With all the girls. Don t sit back here; 
you can t see. Come, get into my carriage." 

"Thank you! I am going home soon," said 
Daphne. " I only came to bring the children 
for a while." 

One of her little brothers now ran along 
side the rockaway, and pointing to her called 
to some one behind : 

"Here she is in here." 

Hilary came round eagerly. 

"Well!" he said, with an air of tremen 
dous relief, "why didn t you come over here 
sooner ? I ve been looking for you all day." 

His chiding friendliness was so sincere that 
she let her hand lie in his with a sense of 
refuge. He wore his Sunday clothes ; and he 
stood wiping his forehead and fanning him- 



40 Summer in Arcady 

self with his new summer hat. A big spray 
of withered honeysuckle was in his button 
hole. His collar had wilted, and his flowing 
blue cravat was loose at his neck. His face 
had in it all the riotous passion of the earth 
and the sun at play. 

" Why didn t you come ? " he repeated in 
the tone of a good-natured scolding. 

"I couldn t." Her lips began to quiver 
and her eyes fell. 

" Well, it s not too late ! " he cried, cheer 
ing her up roughly. " Come on and dance 
with me! They are just making up a set. 
Come on ! " 

He opened the door of the rockaway. 

" Come on ! " he repeated with overbearing 
confidence. " I want to dance with you ! " 

With a sudden thought Daphne s lips 
ceased quivering and her eyes flashed: a 
woman does not need more than a minute 
in which to revenge herself for a day or 
for a lifetime. 

She put her daintily-slippered foot out on 
the step of the rockaway, and gave him her 



Summer in A ready 41 

hands with a little laugh that was as reck 
less with joy as the note of an escaped bird. 

When the dance was over they went back 
to the rockaway, happy and fanning them 
selves. As she resumed her seat she made 
way for him to sit beside her. 

" Good-by ! " he said with a gay dismissal, 
and without offering his hand, as he hurried 
off. 

It was like a blow in her face. With a 
startled, yearning look at him, she sank 
miserably back into the corner. 

For more than an hour she waited, but 
he did not come again ; and toward dusk, 
having found her brothers, Daphne took each 
by the hand and started toward the rock- 
away. 

As she was passing through the vehicles 
she heard his low, confidential talk close to 
her ear. The back curtain of a buggy was 
rolled up, and she saw his arm around a girl. 

Soon a miscellaneous clatter arose on the 
turnpike and died away in the distance, leav 
ing a mournful, white dust behind. 



VII 

WHAT are little brothers, if not spies and tale 
bearers and jackals generally ? Daphne s, on 
reaching home, ran confidingly to their father. 
That night the family were called into the par 
lour. Her father sat upon her case as a court 
of ecclesiastical inquiry ; and at the neighbour 
hood church the next morning, which was Sun 
day, Daphne acknowledged her waywardness 
before the whole congregation, and was kept 
within the membership. Her sobs were ac 
cepted as showing the sincerity of her repent 
ance ; but only Daphne herself knew why they 
brought no relief to an unutterable heartache. 
Not that she did not believe that she had com 
mitted a sin ; her religious training convicted 
her of this. For Daphne s idea of the devil 
was that he lived somewhere in the earth 
perhaps moved about under her father s farm 
and that he was altogether too near to be 
42 



Summer in Arcady 43 

trifled with. To her mind he was especially on 
the lookout for young people who moved their 
feet in certain ways to the sound of music. If 
you can imagine a small insect on the outside 
of a walnut keeping quiet through terror of an 
enormous insect mysteriously at work on the in 
side, and reported capable of bursting through 
the shell if in any way annoyed, you will under 
stand how grateful she was for now being given 
a chance to assure Beelzebub that she would 
never dance again. 

But Hilary stood his ground even though 
the devil s own. He was not at church that 
morning, having gone off in his buggy with a 
girl to another church miles away across the 
country ; but he was quoted as having said that 
if the devil wanted him for dancing with the 
pretty girls at a picnic, he could have him 
and welcome. But meantime, till he came for 
his property, he d dance on. 

Having twice gone to see him at his home 
without finding him, one afternoon during the 
week the elders of the church mounted their fat 
saddle horses and racked comfortably over to 



44 Summer in Arcady 

where he was ploughing on the other side of 
his farm. He was pouring out the everlasting 
praises of his favourite theme as they ap 
proached him down the corn-rows ; and al 
though their memories were now an armoury of 
scriptural texts, they might as well have gone 
out to capture a tremendous young bear by 
merely carrying along the sacred description 
of a rifle. 

In neighbourhoods quiet and settled, every 
body knows not only what kind of children 
are born in it, but what kind are going to be 
born ; and a young man may gain a reputa 
tion before he earns it. Some quality in the 
strain of the family, or some sign in the early 
build and look of the boy himself, is held for 
as good or as bad as conduct; and old 
people, who may be stupid enough on other 
subjects, often scan their own offspring 
and that of their acquaintances with a pre 
ternatural wisdom in reading the early prep 
aration of nature, and get ready in mind 
and heart, sometimes in distress, for what 
is sure to come in the course of time. And 



Summer in Arcady 45 

sometimes they scan them with as preternatu 
ral a folly. 

Neighbourly talk had always greatly por 
tended that in Hilary s case the boy would 
be father to the man ; and the boy had 
always passed for what people who are more 
or less wooden, deem wild. The old stumps 
in a forest are wiser : they never reproach the 
dancing, sappy, leafy boughs. 

In addition to these prophecies, his father 
had died before he turned eighteen; and at 
the period of passing into the years that nat 
ure makes so unruly, he had stepped forward 
to the head of the family and management 
of the farm. His middle-aged neighbours had 
then been forced to adjust themselves to a 
further change in his habits and his bearing, 
and it had gone hard with some of them; for 
the old are often shocked by the discovery that 
the young have grown up and must be treated 
as men. And he soon made them feel not only 
that he was a man, but that he had taken the 
bit entirely in his own teeth and meant to 
choose his own road and go his own gait. 



46 Summer in Arcady 

It had come as a surprise, therefore, when 
the summer preceding this he had joined 
the church. His confession had been re 
ceived at the time with secret misgivings : 
with misgivings they had seen him baptized, 
and with misgivings on the following Sunday 
morning they had presented him with a little 
red Testament as his earthly rule of faith and 
practice. But the entire congregation had 
filed past him, singing and offering him the 
right hand of their Christian fellowship, 
some at least with that grasp of the hand 
which means forgiveness of the past, and the 
hope of a life where none of us shall need to 
be forgiven. 

And now, in the first year of his member 
ship, he had fallen from grace. 

When the boy saw them coming toward 
him down the corn-rows, he laughed quietly 
to himself, stopped his horse, sat down on his 
plough, and began trimming his finger-nails; 
and the elders on coming up threw their legs 
over the pommels of their soft saddles and 
sternly whittled the butt ends of their 



Summer in Arcady 47 

switches as they reasoned with him touching 
his eternal damnation. 

" No, sir," he said, at a certain point in 
the discussion, looking up at Daphne s father 
from under his old straw hat. " I can t 
honestly say to the church that I am sorry 
for what I ve done, because I don t honestly 
believe that I ve done anything wrong. All I 
am sorry for is that anybody else thinks so." 

They had never talked with him seriously 
on any subject before. The cool, polite way 
in which he opposed his convictions to theirs 
as though they were entitled to equal respect 
left them ill at ease and they did not reply 
to his last words at once. He went on in a 
vein of gruff philosophizing : 

"I come of a dancing family. Back in the 
wilderness, in the forts and cabins, they were 
dancing when they were not fighting, and 
fighting when they were not dancing. They 
were dancing in Virginia before they came to 
Kentucky. They were dancing in England 
before they came to Virginia. They were 
dancing wherever they were before that. I 



48 Summer in Arcady 

suppose they ve been dancing since they were 
first created. I don t know much history, 
but I know a little. It s natural for people 
to dance. It does them good. I know it 
does me good." 

Daphne s father made his one stern, brief 
rejoinder : 

" You know the rule of the church ? " 
"But the church is wrong!" replied the 
young fellow, with a heavy, bludgeon-like 
handling of such ideas as he had. " It was 
wrong to take this position at the start. It 
will have to change. It is changing al 
ready. In some parts of the country they 
don t turn the members out for dancing now. 
You know that. And you know that some of 
the best preachers in the church never have 
believed it a sin. There s a difference of 
opinion even in the churches. Then why don t 
you let me have my opinion ? The greater 
part of the world agree with me. You have 
no more right to keep me from dancing than 
I have the right to make you dance and I 
never would think of doing that." 



Summer in Arcady 49 

"Brother Hilary," said the other elder, who 
was the kinder soul of the two, " don t you re 
member what the New Testament says about 
the eating of meat?" 

"Yes," he replied, "but I don t think it 
means that I mustn t dance if you think it s 
wrong." 

"That s just what it does mean," inter 
posed Daphne s father. "/ understand the 
Apostle." 

" So do / understand him ! " exclaimed the 
boy, giving a contemptuous cut at his boot- 
top with the end of his plough-line. 

" Beware of causing others to stumble," 
said the milder officer, who hereupon shut up 
his penknife with a warning click and threw 
his leg into place. 

"All I have to say is, if my dancing ever 
caused anybody to stumble, he couldn t stand 
up if I didn t." 

" It were better for a millstone to be tied 
around your neck, and that you were sunk 
in the bottom of the sea," cried Daphne s 
father, gathering up his bridle-reins. 



50 Summer in Arcady 

" Sink or swim, I m going to dance," said 
Hilary. " But it s all nonsense. You are 
quoting texts to me that don t apply to my 
case. And you ought to know it. If you 
are going to turn me out of the church, it 
ought not to be for dancing. It ought to be 
for worse things things that I am sorry for, 
but that I do. And there is one thing that 
I don t want you to misunderstand : all that 
I have said has been against you, remember, 
and not against the Bible; and to my mind 
there is a difference." 

He rose from his plough as he spoke, and 
looked from the one to the other of them with 
his face growing solemn as he concluded : 
" Turn me out ! But you will have to answer 
for the consequences. You know how this 
hurts a young man at the beginning of his life 
at the beginning of his temptations and real 
struggles, when you old people ought to help 
him." 

He stepped behind his plough and started his 
horse with a quiet, friendly cluck. 

The next Sunday the elders and the deacons 



Summer in Arcady 5 1 

rode gravely to church through the June woods, 
and sat as an ecclesiastical body on the front 
seat. The gravest among them was Daphne s 
father, who at intervals held to his nose a 
green walnut which he had pulled on the way, 
as was often his wont at this season. He 
smelled at it in long, devoted, audible draughts, 
as if fearing that otherwise he might be an 
noyed with the odour of brimstone. At the 
proper moment he arose and laid the case 
before the church with a recommendation, and 
the congregation thereupon withdrew its mem 
bership from Hilary. On the way home 
Daphne s father, who was in all things a wal 
nut-smelling person of the most superior sort, 
forbade her to receive any further attentions 
from him. 

The next day he met Hilary in the lane and 
drew in his nag, but without any greeting. 

" Your bull has been breaking through my 
fences again," he said. " I want you to keep 
him at home hereafter." 

" If you kept your fences up," the young 
farmer replied bluntly, " my bull wouldn t 



52 Summer in Arcady 

break through them. He never breaks through 
my fences." He was talking to another farmer 
now, not to an elder of the church, and his 
manner was fiercer. 

" You ve no right to keep any such dangerous 
animal in the neighbourhood," insisted the elder 
hotly. 

" Right or wrong, I keep him," replied Hilary. 
" A bull that didn t have spirit enough in him 
to jump some fences wouldn t be of any use to 
me. But, of course, I know that troubles in 
the church keep you busy." 

His clear eyes rested with sarcastic mischief 
on the elder, who rose suddenly in his stirrups, 
as though he would have struck him. 

" Never do you darken my door again, sir," 
he said, his voice getting thick with anger, 
"or speak to a member of my family," and he 
drove his heels into his horse s ribs and started 
off. 

The boy sat still for a moment looking after 
him. 

"If he only were about my age," he said 
slowly to himself, "or anywhere under fifty." 



Summer in Arcady 53 

And then he spurred forward and rode beside 
him. 

"There was one question I wanted to ask 
you," he said savagely. 

The elder glared at him without speaking. 

" I ve heard you say the church was meant to 
save sinners. I reckon you wouldn t object to 
my coming to church the same as before?" 

And the next Sunday he was back in his old 
seat. A thrill shot through the congregation at 
the sight of this black sheep of the fold, whose 
very wool now seemed to smell ominously all 
over the church. So that Daphne s father pro 
duced his green walnut at once ; and his prayer 
had that peculiar tone in which men sometimes 
virtually say to the Almighty that He can rely 
upon them to see that all sinners are duly 
punished. 

Hilary could watch Daphne from where he 
sat ; and during the prayer Daphne, under a 
pretext, opened her eyes to get her handker 
chief and glanced at him. When their eyes 
met, his face took on a smile of victory and 
contempt. In return Daphne gave him a smile 



54 Summer in Arcady 

of the wickedest approval ; and if they had 
ridden all day in his buggy, she could not better 
have expressed her forgiveness for his rudeness 
to her at the picnic and in the field. 



VIII 

HAS it ever been remarked that when a 
scandal like this occurs in a country neighbour 
hood, somebody soon afterwards gives a dinner 
to several ladies ? The connection of terrestrial 
happenings is not always clear. Who would 
suspect that a calm, remote, little thing like the 
moon could so trouble the seas ? Or that the 
dark side of it brings the waters rushing 
together as tumultuously as the bright? 

The Thursday following there was one of 
these dinners, and it was one of those long, 
dry, summer days when the ladies arrive with 
freshly starched faces before it gets hot, and 
leave with freshly starched faces after it gets 
cool. 

The guests, although having that sense of 

bodily comfort which precedes the certainty of 

delicacies and which makes people kindly and 

confidential in advance, were sitting together 

55 



56 Summer in Arcady 

in the forenoon amid the most frigid attempts 
to start a conversation. At last one of them 
ventured upon the dryest, simplest mention of 
Hilary s name. After that the deluge. 

They reviewed his entire past. One told 
how, as a little boy, he had always come into 
church with the other members of the family, 
and sung out of a hymn-book with his mother ; 
but in the last few years had waited outside 
with the fast young men of the neighbourhood, 
keeping a purely secular eye upon the girls in 
the carriages as they drove up to the steps. 
Another remembered that he regularly marched 
in at the head of these upon the singing of the 
last hymn, and sat far back among the hardened 
and the backsliders ; and that sometimes he 
whittled matches, more than one of which ex 
ploded with a loud crack close to the ear of one 
of the most venerable sisters in the fold ; that 
if the sermon was long, he snapped his watch 
at the preacher loud enough for half the con 
gregation to hear; that at times he did not 
come to church at all, but was away, no one 
knew where. A third recalled how he would 



Summer in Arcady 57 

never miss a circus in the neighbouring towns, 
and would often guy the clown in a voice to 
be heard above the uproar of the ring ; that 
once being bantered by the clown in return, he 
had shed his coat and tried to ride the mule 
and did ride it until the mule lay down and rolled 
on him. It was not forgotten that he had always 
been fond of the negro minstrel shows, where he 
picked up songs and the best of his jokes to be 
retold on Saturday afternoons at the blacksmith 
shop, where the young farmers assembled to 
pitch quoits and hear the news. One of them 
had heard from her husband that he could be 
seen about the court-house square on county 
court days in the neighbouring counties, smoking 
constantly, shaking hands right and left, and 
followed by other young fellows trying to smoke 
and shake hands like him all with a colour in 
their faces that did not come from the sun. It 
seems, also, that he would be the last to start 
home from town toward nightfall, and when he 
did start, whirled out of the livery stable in a 
curve that made the buggy reel ; passing every 
body on the way home, over rocks, ruts, culverts, 



58 Summer in Arcady 

bridges, and those long piles of cracked lime 
stone that are so terrible to a horse s feet. It 
was not related, however, that once in this way 
he had spun so dizzily around two old jogging 
neighbours of his husbands of two of these 
ladies that they had spoken up feelingly on 
the subject of old Bourbon, and the better to 
illustrate to each other the proper use of this 
wily spirit, had produced a confidential bottle 
from under the buggy-seat and exchanged their 
" regards." But it was known that once he had 
come in unsteadily upon one of these good old 
men as he warmed himself at the office stove of 
the livery stable, had sat down in his lap, and 
throwing his arms around him had challenged 
him to billiards for fried oysters. 

By degrees the conversation drifted into 
darker channels as the caldron bubbled more 
furiously being so richly fed. They recalled, 
with low, sad voices, the fact that about two 
years before this he had been sent as a student 
to the State college, and after a short career 
had returned home disgraced. And since then 
he had become wilder ; the hurrying hoof -beats 



Summer in Arcady 59 

of his little mare could be heard up and down 
the turnpike long after midnight, miles away 
from home. What was the meaning of those 
songs of his, always of the same tenor ? 

From this point the talk, if submitted for 
print, must have lost in volume by reason of 
expurgations. The whole conversation might 
have made Dr. Johnson s ideal book : one con 
sisting of a preface, setting forth what it would 
contain, followed by an appendix stating why 
it did not contain it. 

Daphne and her mother were among the 
company. The girl had sat silent thus 
far, her head bent low over her needle 
work. 

Her mother, also, had taken little part in the 
talk. She was one of the crushed and silent 
women. The wives of such elders usually are. 
When she spent a day abroad, her habit of 
silence lay on her still. Her conversation con 
sisted mainly of replies to questions. If she 
volunteered a remark, it was usually a quotation 
or a timid interpretation of her husband s opin 
ions. She never dared quote or interpret him 



60 Summer in Arcady 

to his face ; and this boldness behind his back 
was the last strain of vivacity in her that sur 
vived his desolating tyranny. 

At last the conversation turned on the sub 
ject of the picnic, and then she felt emboldened 
to make a remark : 

" My husband will never forgive him for tak 
ing advantage of a child like Daphne. He felt 
the disgrace of it terribly on account of his posi 
tion in the church." 

Daphne here dropped her sewing as though 
it were a coal. 

" Now, mother, you hush," she exclaimed. 
Her lips were white and quivering with anger 
and with the heartache of those two infinite 
hours. A ^ they had been sitting there with 
out observing her ! They saw her now, and 
such a silence filled the room that the sounds of 
insect life out in the yard were heard through 
the open doors and windows. Daphne picked 
up her work again and bent her head lower. 
But the silence lasted ; and feeling that their 
eyes were turned on her like burning-glasses, 
and that it was too late now ever to undo the 



Summer in Arcady 61 

scandal of her words, she folded her hands and 
fixed her eyes on her mother again. 

"You know that I am not a child," she said. 
"You know that Hilary did not take any ad 
vantage of me. You know that I did not dis 
grace anybody. And father knows it. Then 
why do you say so ? I ll tell you why I danced, 
if you want to know. And I ll tell him when I 
get home. And why don t you keep out of this 
gossip ? I am sick of it," she continued excit 
edly, her eyes flashing as she looked round 
upon them all. " And you are no better than 
mischief-makers. What you ve been saying are 
lies! " She flirted out of the room with a back 
ward toss of her head and taking her seat on 
the porch went on with her w6*I 

This spoiled the dinner. One cannot per 
fectly enjoy the hospitality of a hostess whom 
one has just accused of telling lies, and the 
hostess does not perfectly enjoy having one try. 
But great things were possible to the company 
that day. Daphne at the table was so pressed 
with attentions from her hostess and the guests 
that the occasion was as good as an ovation in 



62 Summer in Arcady 

her honour. She was glad enough to smooth 
over the rupture ; for she was secretly terrified 
by the thought that they would misunderstand 
her motive in taking Hilary s part, and make a 
neighbourhood scandal of that. Simple, seven 
teen-year-old Daphne ! As if those wiseacres 
did not understand perfectly now what the mat 
ter was, and as if one-half of them were not 
already preparing to tell the other half that 
they had known it all the time. 

The ladies separated into groups of twos and 
threes immediately after dinner and strolled 
away on their quiet little biological walks, some 
around the flower-beds in the front yard, some 
to look at the grapes and young vegetables in 
the garden ; and then it was that they began to 
give each other nudges that were as long as 
paragraphs and glances that would have filled a 
page. Daphne s mother having framed awk 
ward excuses a little later for starting home, 
some salt-rising had to be made for supper, 
they came together again ; and once more there 
followed a frigid effort to begin general conver 
sation. One of them at last inquired Daphne s 



Summer in Arcady 63 

age, and everything else followed. It was like 
turning up a long open tube filled with shot. 
They did not even omit the story of how 
Daphne had as a child never cared for dolls, 
but liked better to play with little boys and was 
often caught hugging them. Another of the 
guests soon made excuses for leaving ; and she 
availed herself of the extra time to drive by 
and talk the rest of the afternoon with Hilary s 
mother. And then, having made all the mis 
chief she could in one day, at the close of it she 
felt so proud of herself, and so pleased with her 
virtues, that on the way home she leaned back 
in the corner of the rockaway, closed her eyes, 
folded her hands over her waist, and, unmind 
ful even of the fact that she was crushing her 
bonnet, she sang over and over again her favour 
ite hymn : 

"Just as I am, without one plea! " 

Pleasant to human nature are its lies ! 

Cutting words passed between Daphne and 
her father that night words that life is too 
short to make forgotten. She was sitting at 



64 Summer in Arcady 

the window of her room as late as twelve 
o clock, her eyes swollen and sobs still trem 
bling on her lips. Poor child, poor Daphne! 
Any rebellion against the general order of 
things in this world was beyond her intelli 
gence. Her quarrel with life directed itself 
against a dozen or more people as the wilful 
originators of all her grief and restlessness and 
pain ; and she believed that as soon as she 
were rid of these, she would be perfectly happy. 
She had all the desires she wanted, and she 
would gratify these just as she chose. 

She did not care enough for her father to 
have been deeply wounded by anything he said. 
But aroused to the idea that he was mainly 
responsible for her unhappiness, she recalled 
the things she had against him as far back in 
life as she could remember. 

There is no earthly tribunal so terrible, both 
in its justice and in its injustice, as the mind of 
a child bent upon finding out why it turns 
against a parent. It always does find out ; and 
Daphne s memory fished up some black and 
curious things from the river of the past. 



Slimmer in Arcady 65 

She was too young to make allowances for 
his faults, and perhaps she was too truly his 
child to have been able to show him the mercy 
that he denied to her. The young never real 
ize when judging the old that the old are in a 
measure irresponsible and guiltless. The old 
themselves never fully understand why it is 
that despite all their wisdom and struggles they 
do not become better than they are. Daphne 
could not see generations of faulty people dark 
ening away behind her father and handing 
down to him their injustice, hardness, unlov- 
ableness, their warped and purblind consciences ; 
could not see that he could no more help being 
what he was than she could help being what 
she was : so that both of them might well have 
been more patient and forgiving with each 
other. But it takes a great deal of inner light 
to see this outer darkness enveloping our life, 
and a great deal of goodness to walk sweetly 
forward through it. 

Of one fact during these unhappy hours 
she remained unaware : that whenever she was 
thinking of her father her tears ceased; and 



66 Summer in Arcady 

whenever she was remembering Hilary they 
flowed again. Those stories about his life in 
the town while he was a student and of his 
expulsion from college were they true ? 
Those midnight rides and songs ever since 
did they mean what those old mothers had 
said they meant ? 

Among all the terrible things her father had 
said, the chief one with which he had fright 
ened her, was the idea that she had now made 
herself the subject of a new and more serious 
neighbourhood scandal. And most of all, he 
had forbidden her ever to see Hilary again. 

Nevertheless the plan which Daphne had 
been forming all night was to see Hilary once 
more as soon as possible. Scandal or no scan 
dal, she must let him know that she had taken 
his part as his friend, and correct any false 
impression that he might have formed of her 
character and her motive. 

Then she would tell him that it was the last 
time they could meet, and say good-by. And 
then she would always live a sad and lonely 
woman in this dark and dreary world. Daphne 



Summer in Arcady 67 

was so soothed and cheered by the future image 
of herself as a sad and lonely woman in a dark 
and dreary world, that she got into bed imme 
diately and had a delicious sleep. 

Through her sleep she was out in the green 
meadow, and he was coming down the path 
to meet her. Once in the vividness of the 
vision she stretched out her arms : her lips 
parted and her bosom heaved with a long, deep 
breath of peace. 

Love had at least taken possession of her 
dreams : and Love knows that dreams are 
often the most important thing to capture. 



IX 

HILARY S mother was waiting for him when 
he reached home late that night. For years 
they had spread the report, as they always 
do, that he had broken her heart. If so, she 
idolized him with the fragments. Not a night 
in all that time but she placed a lamp in the 
window to guide him home across the storm- 
swept fields ; in winter kept the fire bright 
for him ; made him draw off his soaking or 
frozen boots for a warm foot-bath ; wiped his 
feet in her own lap, pressing them jealously 
against her heart ; asked no questions ; thought 
no wrong ; watched with devoted eyes his 
face with the flickering firelight on it, now 
thoughtful, now happy with the pleasure of 
things in which he allowed her no share ; when 
he was in bed, often stole into his room to 
give a last tuck to his feet and touch his 
68 



Summer in Arcady 69 

forehead with her lips ; and afterwards prayed 
for him in tears and with pride at her own 
shining pillow ; a divine love and trust, which 
is perhaps the best anchor that we men can 
ever be held by during those raging years. 

The front door stood open, a swinging lamp 
burned low in the hall, and as he walked up 
the pavement, having taken the bridle and 
saddle off his mare, he saw the soft, slow 
movement of her fan. He sat down at her 
feet, leaning against a white Corinthian col 
umn, and took out a cigar. 

" Don t smoke yet," she said, and she 
brought him a saucer of his favourite cream 
and a plate of his favourite cake. He was in 
one of his quiet moods, and ate it in silence. 
But she knew how to wait. Then he lighted 
his cigar. 

"You d better go to bed, mother," he said 
gently. He liked to talk of her as though 
she were a child. 

" It s too hot. Surely it will rain to-morrow. 
It has been lightning in the north." She 
leaned forward and looked intently at the sky 



7O Summer in Arcady 

as if a shower were the only thing in the 

world she could be minding. 
"The corn needs it." 
" And the garden everything." 
" Has anybody been here to see me since 

dinner?" 

"No. Somebody has been to see me" 

"One of your beaux?" 

" Never you mind." 

She often coquetted with him. Southern 

women characteristically do with their grown 

sons. It is the lingering remnant of an old 

prodigal habit. 

"I know! I saw her rockaway." 

"I don t believe it. Who was she?" 

" Never you mind. And I can guess what 

she came for." 
"What?" 

"To tell you about the dinner to-day." 
She did not reply at once. When she did, 

her words had the calm of a coming storm. 
"She did tell me about that." 
He remained silent, not being further inter 
ested ; and her fan moved before her face 

with slow precision. 



Summer in Arcady 71 

-Hilary!" 

"Yes m." 

"There was a disgraceful scene at that 
dinner to-day." 

" There always is at that house, isn t there ? 
Isn t that the reason you and the others who 
were invited didn t go ? " 

" I don t mean that now ! " 

Her tone caught his ear as unusual. More 
over, when his mother said that anything was 
disgraceful, it was disgraceful. 

She began and told him, not exactly 
the facts, but what had been reported as 
facts ; and naturally her informant had not 
repeated what the ladies had said about her 
own son. It is remarkable that a woman who 
is not a gossip will believe a gossip when the 
tale flows in with the current of her anxieties. 
Hilary s mother had in mind the girl that she 
wanted him to marry. The recent coupling 
of his name with Daphne s aroused her to 
prompt decisive action. 

He listened without comment ; but his 
cigar went out ; he was interested, 



72 Summer in Arcady 

The old clock behind the door in the hall 
struck one. She rose and stood over him. 

"It is not a delicate thing for a mother to 
say to a son, and you know that I have never 
said such a thing to you. But" her tone 
was gentle, merciless " the girl is in love 
with you, and she has shown it, and it will 
be talked about all over the neighbourhood. 
Keep away from her ! She is not the kind 
of a girl you want to have anything to do 
with. There are some things I can t very 
well explain to you, but if I must I will ! " 

One of her hands sought for his forehead 
under his heavy hair. 

"Good-night," she murmured, and she bent 
down and laid her lips on it. 

He threw away his cigar, and putting up 
his arms drew her face down to his like a 
child. 

When she reached the doorway of the hall, 
she turned. 

"Would you like to know now what I 
mean ? " Her voice was calm and deter 
mined. 



Summer in Arcady 73 

"No m. Good-night." 

His setter got up from where it had been 
lying on the other side of the porch, and 
stretched itself beside him. He lighted a 
cigar. 

Young men of twenty do not care much 
for what their mothers may think about girls. 
The world has grown a deal wiser since 
mothers understood that subject, if they ever 
did. These sons, on the other hand, have 
mastered that branch of knowledge. Hilary 
considered himself a man who was able to do 
his own thinking ; and it afforded him now 
some amusement that his mother should un 
dertake, at this late day, to give him advice 
about his own specialty. 

But he began to turn over the account he 
had received of the day s doings. It struck 
him that the girl, arraigned before that tri 
bunal of women, was a good deal like him 
self, when summoned of old before the faculty 
of the college. She had honestly told them 
what she thought of them, and he on one 
occasion had told the faculty in pretty much 



74 Summer in Arcady 

the same terms what he thought of them. 
He liked her spirit immensely, and he re 
solved, the first chance he could get, to let 
her know it. 

And then she had declined to allow the 
blame of the dancing to rest on him that fact 
had been incidentally dropped by his mother 
as it had been incidentally imparted by the 
tale-bearer. His heart warmed to her for this. 
He remembered how he had once fought a 
student for involving him without ground in 
a college scrape, when he had scrapes enough 
of his own. It was fair-minded in her; and 
fair play was a thing that he might have 
prided himself upon having always tried to 
practise. It was courageous in her ; and he 
did not respect anybody man or woman 
who was not courageous. 

Altogether he liked better the way she had 
acted in the whole matter than his own con 
duct ; for he had certainly helped to get her 
into the trouble, and it had not even occurred 
to him to try to help her out. Now she was 
more deeply in than ever. She had bearded 



Summer in Arcady 75 

those old gossips in their den. They would 
never forgive her, and they would have their 
revenge. That was why they had already 
started this new scandal that she was in love 
with him. And when they had used that 
scandal against her until they got tired of it, 
they would invent some other. He was in a 
position to know what this kind of rapid in 
eradicable scandal-growth meant. Experience 
had taught him. In his own case he had 
gone on in his own way, and had left every 
thing to settle itself, or to unsettle itself, as 
it chose or did not choose ; and he would no 
more have taken the trouble to turn upon his 
vilifiers than he would have made a trip to 
the woods for the purpose of stamping out 
the toadstools ; some would be dying by the 
time he got there, and others would be 
springing up the moment he was gone. 

But his mother s last words about Daphne 
what did they mean ? What were those things 
about her that she could not explain to him ? 
If he had been a gentleman, of course, he would 
have let that question go unanswered. But he 



76 Summer in Arcady 

was not quite a gentleman, and he resolved to 
see her and find out for himself. As for asking 
his mother to tell him, or even allowing her to 
tell him he tossed his cigar out into the 
grass. 

And as for letting any amount of gossip that 
had influenced or might hereafter influence his 
mother prejudice him against the girl who had 
befriended him his state of mind on that sub 
ject was also expressed by the same gesture. 

They were close to Nature as they lay there 
that summer night those two young animals. 
The dog was the better trained, and had be 
hind him generations of better trained fathers ; 
for what is it to train a whole race of dogs in 
comparison with a single human being the 
very breath of whose life is error? 

The dog at best would have made but a poor 
sort of human creature; but the fellow would 
at least have made a noble dog. He had the 
sovereign qualities of courage and faithfulness 
and affection, with no mean order of sagacity ; 
and if he hunted much, at least he always 
hunted fairly and in the open field. 



Summer in Arcady 77 

Take a cannon-ball of the best metal that 
may be cast. Hollow it out. Fill it with 
water. Plug it tight. Put it under the cor 
ner of a house, so that the weight of the 
house will rest on the plug. Then let Nature 
come along in a freezing mood, and one of two 
things will happen : the water will force the 
plug and lift the house, or the ball will burst. 
And if she requires so much room in which 
to freeze, think of the space that she needs 
for heat ! Nature quietly asks room for the 
operations of her laws ; if it is not given, she 
takes it, and you take the consequences. If 
the young man s life had overflowed the inno 
cent banks of childhood, if wild oats seem to 
spring up wherever he had trod, you could not 
have gotten from him any intelligent account 
of what he was doing. You would have had to 
question Nature and his forefathers, and some 
of the people who had always influenced him. 

He had never had a moral friend among his 
young neighbourhood associates ; if he had had 
one, he would not have believed in him ; and 
for many a generation, perhaps, he had not 



78 Slimmer in Arcady 

had a strictly moral male ancestor. What 
chance was there for him, even before he was 
born, ever to see and to love the right as it 
is seen and loved by the right-minded ? What 
chance was there for him, after birth, to grow 
up unlike those who taught him their ways of 
life before he was old enough to understand 
there are other and better ways the only 
true ones ? When he was a little fellow also, 
going around with his father, he often fell 
into the company of a group of old farmers 
who were cracking broad jokes at each other 
with great laughter, or telling stories about 
their young days. He looked up to these big, 
burly, ruddy men ; he felt ashamed that he 
alone of the company had no good stories to 
tell about himself, and he determined to have 
the stories by and by. 

By and by he had them. They will not be 
told here except one which has been darkly 
hinted at. It is scant credit to him but it 
is justice, nevertheless to have it known in 
its truth. 

One autumn he had been sent as a student 



Summer in Arcady 79 

to the State college, and a room engaged for 
him in the dormitories, in order that he might 
fall more closely under the fatherly care of 
the president. Up to the following Christmas 
he fell at intervals under the fatherly care of 
the entire faculty. 

His career as an academician ranged through 
the tenets of many unlike systems of philoso 
phy, and by turns he was everything except 
one thing only he was never platonic. 

In a few weeks after his entering, the top of 
his bureau and the edge of his looking-glass 
blossomed out into a bower of the photographs 
of the girls he soon met, and of actresses 
whom he had never seen but whose curves 
and poses struck his fancy. He soon wore 
the bloom off of two cadet uniforms ; and on 
Saturday afternoons was much in evidence 
walking along Main street in the tarnished 
splendour of one of these a cigarette in his 
fingers, his heavy front of yellow hair hanging 
forward as a bang under the lip of his gray 
cap, and his glance roving about for anything 
feminine and attractive that passed and would 



8o Summer in Arcady 

notice him. He spent a good deal of time 
around the livery stables, where he took part 
with the men in the talk about stock and 
crops, and occasionally met farmers from his 
neighbourhood. In his college society, they 
quickly chose him as a marshal at their open 
sessions ; and on these occasions, gorgeous in 
sash, rosette, and white gloves, he would guide 
the company to their seats ushering the 
girls along with an official pressure of their 
beautiful soft arms, the real nature of which 
did not deceive them, however. And now and 
then he made a recitation that fairly took the 
breath of a professor away, merely to show 
everybody that he was not a fool. 

The downfall of his scholastic career came 
about through a cornet. Being of a musical 
turn, he had entered the college band, and had 
elected to play upon that instrument, which 
is known to be of a most uncertain perform 
ance in the wind when not kept strictly to its 
better and more reasonable nature. His favour 
ite hours of practice he thought would be in 
his room at night ; but he was soon admon- 



Summer in Arcady 8 1 

ished that this was not allowable. Occasion 
ally, however, he would allow himself one va 
grant blast he called it blowing the dust out 
of Gabriel s throat that awoke the sleepers 
around, leaving them to regain their dreams 
as best they could. 

One night he had come from the theatre 
after an hour or more about town and he 
was feeling ungovernably alive ; and when he 
got into his room and lighted his student s 
lamp, and did not wish to go to bed, and did 
not wish to get his lessons, the spirit of the 
cornet came upon him, and swearing that he 
would practise when and where he pleased, 
he reached for Gabriel. 

Across the hall opposite Hilary s room was 
the room of a tall, green sapling from the 
foothills of the Cumberland a transplanted 
sapling that had swayed backward and forward 
till midnight before an awful thing called 
Greek, and that meant to get up at five 
o clock the next morning and sway on, as it 
had been swaying for the three months past. 
Meantime the sapling asked for rest. 



82 Summer in Arcady 

Hilary had hardly begun to woo the ear of 
night with his fingering fantasies, when his 
door was flung open, and the sapling stood in 
the doorway, his short shirt fluttering about 
his thin loins, and his legs rising from the 
floor to his slab trunk like a pair of long, 
yellow ivory compasses. 

The musician was sitting in his chair with 
his face toward the door, his eyes blinking 
softly like a cat s before a fire, and his cheeks 
puffed out like an old picture of Boreas. 

The storm-swept sapling said something 
that was drowned by the music and waited. 
Then he spoke again and waited. Then he 
advanced his compasses and with one leg of 
them, and an inconceivable nimbleness for 
anything so rigid, kicked Gabriel against the 
ceiling with a crash ; and then there was 
called a meeting of the faculty the next after 
noon, and the young Kentucky highlander and 
the young Kentucky lowlander attended the 
meeting. 

The complaints of a faculty are often like 
the janitor s keys a bunch gradually made up 



Summer in Arcady 83 

of little and large, so that whenever they care 
to use one they can have them all. Hilary 
was invited to examine a surprising bunch of 
keys, and to testify to what kind of a door each 
key unlocked. He quietly acknowledged to 
the big keys, but of the little ones grew heady 
and contemptuous, going so far as to say that 
the faculty made as much trouble about noth 
ing as a lot of old cats at night on a backyard 
fence. What right had they to pry into a 
young fellow s outside affairs ? Suppose the 
students were to pry into their outside affairs ? 
What was sauce for the gander ought to be 
good sauce for the gosling, etc., etc. 

The first light snows of the year were falling. 
The Thanksgiving gobbler had been selected at 
home. The quails were fat in the fields, and 
the rabbits were nibbling the cabbages in the 
gardens. His setter missed him sadly. He 
and the faculty held irreconcilable views of life 
and discipline ; and once more the sapling 
swayed on undisturbed before the tongue of 
Pericles. 



THE sunlight grew pale the following morn 
ing ; a shadow crept rapidly over the blue ; 
bolts darted about the skies like maddened red- 
birds ; the thunder, ploughing its way down the 
dome as along zigzag cracks in a stony street, 
filled the caverns of the horizon with reverbera 
tions that shook the earth ; and the rain was 
whirled across the landscape in long, white, 
wavering sheets. Then all day quiet and si 
lence throughout Nature except for the drops, 
tapping high and low the twinkling leaves ; 
except for the new melody of woodland and 
meadow brooks, late silvery and with a voice 
only for their pebbles and moss and mint, but 
now yellow and brawling and leaping back into 
the grassy channels that were their old-time 
beds; except for the indoor music of dripping 
eaves and rushing gutters and overflowing rain- 
barrels. And when at last in the gold of the 
8 4 



Summer in Arcady 85 

cool west the sun broke from the edge of the 
gray, over what a green, soaked, fragrant world 
he reared the arch of Nature s peace ! 

Not a little blade of corn in the fields but 
holds in an emerald vase its treasure of white 
gems. The hemp-stalks bend so low under the 
weight of their plumes, that were a vesper 
sparrow to alight on one for his evening hymn, 
it would go with him to the ground. The lean 
ing barley and rye and wheat flash in the 
last rays their jewelled beards. Under the old 
apple-trees, golden-brown mushrooms are al 
ready pushing upward through the leaf-loam, 
rank with many an autumn s dropping. About 
the yards the peonies fall with faces earthward. 
In the stable-lots the larded porkers, with bris 
tles as clean as frost, and flesh of pinky white 
ness, are hunting with nervous nostrils for the 
lush purslane. The fowls are driving their 
bills up and down their wet breasts. And the 
farmers who have been shelling corn for the 
mill come out of their barns, with their coats 
over their shoulders, on the way to supper, look 
about for the plough-horses, and glance at the 



86 Summer in Arcady 

western sky, from which the last drops are 
falling. 

But soon only a more passionate heat shoots 
from the sun into the planet. The plumes of 
the hemp are so dry again, that by the pollen 
shaken from their tops you can trace the young 
rabbits making their way out to the dusty 
paths. The shadows of white clouds sail over 
purple stretches of bluegrass, hiding the sun 
from the steady eye of the turkey, whose brood 
is spread out before her like a fan on the earth. 
At early morning the neighing of the stallions 
is heard around the horizon ; at noon the bull 
makes the deep, hot pastures echo with his ma 
jestic summons ; out in the blazing meadows 
the butterflies strike the afternoon air with 
more impatient wings ; under the moon all 
night the play of ducks and drakes goes on 
along the margins of the ponds. Young people 
are running away and marrying ; middle-aged 
farmers surprise their wives by looking in on 
them at their butter-making in the sweet 
dairies ; and Nature is lashing everything 
grass, fruit, insects, cattle, human creatures 



Summer in Arcady 87 

more fiercely onward to the fulfilment of her 
ends. She is the great heartless haymaker, 
wasting not a ray of sunshine on a clod, but 
caring naught for the light that beats upon a 
throne, and holding man and woman, with their 
longing for immortality, and their capacities for 
joy and pain, as of no more account than a 
couple of fertilizing nasturtiums. 

The storm kept Daphne at home. On the 
next day the Dearth was yellow with sunlight, 
but there were puddles along the path, and a 
branch rushing swollen across the green valley 
in the fields. On the third, her mother took 
the children to town to be fitted with hats and 
shoes, and Daphne also, to be freshened up 
with various moderate adornments, in view of 
a protracted meeting soon to begin. On the 
fourth, some ladies dropped in to spend the 
day, bearing in mind the episode at the dinner, 
and having grown curious to watch events ac 
cordingly. On the fifth, her father carried out 
the idea of cutting down some cedar-trees in 
the front yard for fence posts ; and whenever 
he was working about the house, he kept her 



88 Slimmer in Arcady 

near to wait on him in unnecessary ways. On 
the sixth, he rode away with two hands and an 
empty wagon-bed for some work on the farm ; 
her mother drove off to another dinner din 
ners never cease in Kentucky, and the wife of 
an elder is not free to decline invitations ; and 
at last she was left alone in the front porch, her 
face turned with burning eagerness toward the 
fields. In a little while she had slipped away. 

All these days Hilary had been eager to see 
her. He was carrying a good many girls in his 
mind that summer ; none in his heart ; but his 
plans concerning these latter were for the time 
forgotten. He hung about that part of his farm 
from which he could have descried her in the 
distance. Each forenoon and afternoon, at the 
usual hour of her going to her uncle s, he rode 
over and watched for her. Other people passed 
to and fro, children and servants, but not 
Daphne ; and repeated disappointments fanned 
his desire to see her. 

When she came into sight at last, he was 
soon walking beside her, leading his horse by 
the reins. 



Slimmer in Arcady 89 

" I have been waiting to see you, Daphne," 
he said, with a smile, but general air of serious 
ness. " I have been waiting a long time for a 
chance to talk to you." 

"And I have wanted to see you," said 
Daphne, her face turned away and her voice 
hardly to be heard. " I have been waiting for 
a chance to talk to you." 

The change in her was so great, so unex 
pected, it contained an appeal to him so touch 
ing, that he glanced quickly at her. Then he 
stopped short and looked searchingly around 
the meadow. 

The thorn-tree is often the only one that can 
survive on these pasture lands. Its spikes, 
even when it is no higher than the grass, keep 
off the mouths of grazing stock. As it grows 
higher, birds see it standing solitary in the 
distance and fly to it, as a resting-place in pass 
ing. Some autumn day a seed of the wild 
grape is thus dropped near its root ; and in 
time the thorn-tree and the grape-vine come 
to thrive together. 

As Hilary now looked for some shade to 



90 Summer in Arcady 

which they could retreat from the blinding, 
burning sunlight, he saw one of these stand 
ing off at a distance of a few hundred yards. 
He slipped the bridle-reins through the head 
stall, and giving his mare a soft slap on the 
shoulder, turned her loose to graze. 

"Come over here and sit down out of the 
sun," he said, starting off in his authoritative 
way. "I want to talk to you." 

Daphne followed in his wake through the 
deep grass. 

When they reached the tree, they sat down 
under the rayless boughs. Some sheep lying 
there ran round to the other side and stood 
watching them, with a frightened look in their 
clear, peaceful eyes. 

"What s the matter?" he said, fanning his 
face, and tugging with his forefinger to loosen 
his shirt-collar from his moist neck. He had 
the manner of a powerful comrade who means 
to succour a weaker one. 

" Nothing," said Daphne like a true woman. 

"Yes, but there is," he insisted. "I got 
you into trouble. I didn t think of that when 
I asked you to dance." 



Summer in A ready 91 

"You had nothing to do with it," retorted 
Daphne, with a flash. "I danced for spite." 

He threw back his head with a peal of 
laughter. All at once this was broken off. 
He sat up, with his eyes fixed on the lower 
edge of the meadow. 

"Here comes your father," he said gravely. 

Daphne turned. Her father was riding 
slowly through the bars. A wagon-bed loaded 
with rails crept slowly after him. 

In an instant the things that had cost her 
so much toil and so many tears to arrange, 
her explanations, her justifications, and her 
parting, all the reserve and the coldness 
that she had laid up in her heart, as one fills 
high a little ice-house with fear of far-off sum 
mer heat all were quite gone, melted away. 
And everything that he had planned to tell 
her was forgotten also at the sight of that 
stern figure on horseback bearing uncon 
sciously down upon them. 

"If I had only kept my mouth shut about 
his old fences," he said to himself. " Confound 
my bull ! " and he looked anxiously at Daphne, 



92 Summer in Arcady 

who sat with her eyes riveted on her father. 
The next moment she had turned, and they 
were laughing in each other s faces. 

" What shall I do ? " she cried, leaning over 
and burying her face in her hands, and lifting 
it again scarlet with excitement. 

"Don t do anything," he said calmly. 

" But, Hilary, if he sees us we are lost." 

"If he sees us, we are found." 

" But he mustn t see me here ! " she cried, 
with something like real terror. " I believe 
I ll lie down in the grass. Maybe he ll think 
I m a friend of yours." 

"My friends all sit up in the grass," said 
Hilary. 

But Daphne had already hidden. 

Many a time when a little girl she had amused 
herself by screaming like a hawk at the young 
guineas, and seeing them cuddle invisible under 
small tufts and weeds. Out in the stable-lot 
where the grass was grazed so close that the 
geese could barely nip it, she would sometimes 
get one of the negro men to scare the little 
pigs, for the delight of seeing them squat as 



Summer in Arcady 93 

though hidden, when they were no more hid 
den than if they had spread themselves out 
upon so many dinner dishes. All of us reveal 
traces of this primitive instinct upon occasion. 
Daphne was doing her best to hide now. 

When Hilary realized it he moved in front 
of her, screening her as well as possible. 

" Hadn t you better lie down, too ? " she 
asked. 

"No," he replied quickly. 

" But if he sees you, he might take a notion 
to ride over this way ! " 

"Then he ll have to ride." 

"But, Hilary, suppose he were to find me 
lying down here behind you, hiding?" 

"Then he ll have to find you." 

" You get me into trouble and then you 
won t help me out ! " exclaimed Daphne with 
considerable heat. 

" It might not make matters any better for 
me to hide," he answered quietly. "But if he 
comes over here and tries to get us into trouble, 
I ll see then what I can do." 

Daphne lay silent for a moment, thinking. 



94 Summer in Arcady 

Then she nestled more closely down, and said 
with gay unconscious archness : 

" I m not hiding because I m afraid of him. 
I m doing it just because I want to." She did 
not know that the fresh happiness flushing her 
at that moment came from the fact of having 
Hilary between herself and her father as a 
protector ; that she was drinking in the de 
light a woman feels in getting playfully behind 
the man she loves in the face of danger ; but 
her action bound her to him and brought her 
more under his influence. 

His words showed that he also felt his posi 
tion the position of the male who stalks forth 
from the herd and stands the silent challenger. 
He was young, and vain of his manhood in the 
usual innocent way that led him to carry the 
chip on his shoulder for the world to knock off ; 
and he placed himself before Daphne with the 
understanding that if they were discovered, 
there would be trouble. Her father was a 
violent man, and the circumstances were not 
such that any Kentucky father would overlook 
them. But with his inward seriousness, his 



Summer in Arcady 95 

face wore its usual look of reckless uncon 
cern. 

" Is he coming this way ? " asked Daphne, 
after an interval of impatient waiting. 

"Straight ahead. Are you hid?" 

" I can t see whether I m hid or not. Where 
is he now? " 

"Right on us." 

" Does he see you ? " 

"Yes." 

" Do you think he sees me ? " 

"I m sure of it." 

"Then I might as well get up," said Daphne 
with the courage of despair, and up she got. 
Her father was riding along the path in front 
of them, but not looking. She was down again 
like a partridge. 

" How could you fool me, Hilary ? Suppose 
he had been looking ! " 

" I wonder what he thinks I m doing, sitting 
over here in the grass like a stump," said 
Hilary. "If he takes me for one, he must 
think I ve got an awful lot of roots." 

"Tell me when it s time to get up." 



96 Slimmer in Arcady 

"I will. 11 

He turned softly toward her. She was lying 
on her side, with her burning cheek in one 
hand. The other hand rested high on the 
curve of her hip. Her braids had fallen for 
ward, and lay in a heavy loop about her lovely 
shoulders. Her eyes were closed, her scarlet 
lips parted in a smile. The edges of her 
snow-white petticoats showed beneath her blue 
dress, and beyond these one of her feet and 
ankles. Nothing more fragrant with inno 
cence ever lay on the grass. 

" Is it time to get up now ? " 

" Not yet," and he sat bending over her. 

"Now?" 

"Not yet," he repeated more softly. 

" Now, then ? " 

"Not for a long time." 

His voice thrilled her, and she glanced up at 
him. His laughing eyes were glowing down 
upon her under his heavy mat of hair. She 
sat up and looked toward the wagon crawling 
away in the distance : her father was no longer 
in sight. 



Summer in Arcady 97 

One of the ewes, dissatisfied with a back 
view, stamped her forefoot impatiently, and ran 
round in front, and out into the sun. Her 
lambs followed; and the three, ranging them 
selves abreast, stared at Daphne with a look 
of helpless inquiry. 

" Sh-pp-pp ! " she cried, throwing up her 
hands at them, irritated. " Go away ! " 

They turned and ran ; the others followed ; 
and the whole number, falling into line, took 
a path meekly homeward. They left a greater 
sense of privacy under the tree. Several yards 
off was a small stock pond. Around the edge 
of this the water stood hot and green in the 
tracks of the cattle and the sheep, and about 
these pools the yellow butterflies were thick, 
alighting daintily on the promontories of the 
mud, or rising two by two through the dazzling 
atmosphere in columns of enamoured flight. 

Daphne leaned over to the bluegrass where 
it swayed unbroken in the breeze, and drew out 
of their sockets several stalks of it, bearing on 
their tops the purplish seed-vessels. With 
them she began to braid a ring about one of 



98 Summer in Arcady 

her fingers in the old simple fashion of the 
country. 

As they talked, he lay propped on his elbow, 
watching her fingers, the soft slow movements 
of which little by little wove a spell over his 
eyes. And once again the power of her beauty 
began to draw him beyond control. He felt 
a desire to seize her hands, to crush them in 
his. His eyes passed upward along her taper 
ing wrists, the skin of which was like mother-of- 
pearl ; upward along the arm to the shoulder 
to her neck to her deeply crimsoned cheeks 
to the purity of her brow to the purity of 
her eyes, the downcast lashes of which hid 
them like conscious fringes. 

An awkward silence began to fall between 
them. Daphne felt that the time had come 
for her to speak. But powerless to begin, 
she feigned to busy herself all the more de 
votedly with braiding the deep green circlet. 
Suddenly he drew himself through the grass 
to her side. 

"Let me!" 

" No ! " she cried, lifting her arm above 



Summer in Arcady 99 

his reach and Looking at him with a gay 
threat. "You don t know how." 

"I do know how," he said with his white 
teeth on his red under-lip, and his eyes spar 
kling ; and reaching upward, he laid his hand 
in the hollow of her elbow and pulled her 
arm down. 

" No ! No ! " she cried again, putting her 
hands behind her back. " You will spoil it ! " 

" I will not spoil it," he said, moving so 
close to her that his breath was on her face, 
and reaching around to unclasp her hands. 

"No! No! No!" she cried, bending away 
from him. " I don t want any ring ! " and 
she tore it from her ringer and threw it out 
on the grass. Then she got up, and brushing 
the grass seed off her lap put on her hat. 

He sat cross-legged on the grass before 
her. He had put on his hat and the brim 
hid his eyes. 

" And you are not going to stay and talk 
to me ? " he said in a tone of reproachfulness 
without looking up. 

She was excited and weak and trembling, 



TOO Summer in Arcady 

and so she put out her hand and took hold 
of a strong loop of the grape-vine hanging 
from a branch of the thorn, and laid her 
cheek against her hand and looked away 
from him. 

" I thought you were better than the 
others," he continued with the bitter wis 
dom of twenty years. " But you women are 
all alike. When a man gets into trouble, you 
desert him. You hurry him on to the devil. 
I have been turned out of the church, and 
now you are down on me. Oh, well ! But 
you know how much I have always liked 
you, Daphne." 

It was not the first time that he had acted 
this character. It had been a favourite rdle. 
But Daphne had never seen the like. She was 
overwhelmed with happiness that he cared so 
much for her; and to have him reproach her 
for indifference, and see him suffering with the 
idea that she had turned against him that 
instantly changed the whole situation. He had 
not heard then what had taken place at the 
dinner. Under the circumstances, feeling cer- 



Summe? -in. A jfcady * - &gt; I o I 

tain that the secret of her love had not been 
discovered, she grew emboldened to risk a 
little more. 

So she turned toward him smiling, and 
swayed gently as she clung to the vine. 

" Yes ; I have my orders not even to 
speak to you ! Never again ! " she said with 
the air of tantalizing. 

"Then stay with me awhile now," he said, 
and lifted slowly to her his appealing face. 
She sat down, and screened herself with a 
little feminine transparency. 

" I can t stay long : it s going to rain ! " 

He cast a wicked glance at the sky from 
under his hat : there were a few clouds on 
the horizon. 

" And so you are never going to speak to 
me again," he said mournfully. 

" Never ! " How delicious her laughter was. 

" I ll put a ring on your finger to remem 
ber me by." 

He lay over in the grass and pulled sev 
eral stalks. Then he lifted his eyes beseech 
ingly to hers. 



IO2 ^ w - : Dimmer in Arkady 

"Will you let me?" 

Daphne hid her hands. He drew himself 
to her side and took one of them forcibly 
from her lap. 

With a slow caressing movement he began 
to braid the grass ring around her finger 
in and out, around and around, his fingers 
laced with her fingers, his palm lying close 
upon her palm, his blood tingling through the 
skin upon her blood. He made the braiding 
go wrong and took it off and began over 
again. Two or three times she drew a deep 
breath, and stole a bewildered look at his 
face, which was so close to hers that his 
hair brushed it so close that she heard 
the quiver of his own breath. Then all at 
once he folded his hands about hers with 
a quick, fierce tenderness and looked up at 
her. She turned her face aside and tried to 
draw her hand away. His clasp tightened. 
She snatched it away and got up with a 
nervous laugh. 

"Look at the butterflies! Aren t they 
pretty?" 



Slimmer in Arcady 103 

He sprang up and tried to seize her hand 
again. 

"You shan t go home yet!" he said in an 
undertone. 

" Shan t I ? " she said, backing away from 
him. " Who s going to keep me ? " 

"7 am" he said, laughing excitedly and 
following her closely. 

" My father s coming ! " she cried out as a 
warning. 

He turned and looked : there was no one 
in sight. 

"He is coming sooner or later!" she 
called. 

She had retreated several yards off into the 
sunlight of the meadow. 

The remembrance of the risk that he was 
causing her to run checked him. He went 
over to her. 

"When can I see you again soon?" 

He had never spoken so seriously to her 
before. He had never before been so serious. 
But within the last hour Nature had been doing 
her work, and its effect was immediate, His 



IO4 Summer in Arcady 

sincerity instantly conquered her. Her eyes 
fell. 

"No one has any right to keep us from 
seeing each other!" he insisted. "We must 
settle that for ourselves." 

Daphne made no reply. 

"But we can t meet here any more with 
people passing backwards and forwards ! " he 
continued rapidly and decisively. "What has 
happened to-day mustn t happen again." 

" No ! " she replied in a voice barely to be 
heard. " It must never happen again. We 
can t meet here." 

They were walking side by side now toward 
the meadow path. As they reached it he 
paused : 

"Come to the back of the pasture to 
morrow! at four o clock!" he said tenta 
tively, recklessly. 

Daphne did not answer as she moved away 
from him along the path homeward. 

" Will you come ? " he called out to her. 

She turned and shook her head. Whatever 
her own new plans may have become, she was 
once more happy and laughing. 



Summer in Arcady 105 

"Come, Daphne!" 

She walked several paces further and turned 
and shook her head again. 

" Come ! " he pleaded. 

She laughed at him. 

He wheeled round to his mare grazing near. 
As he put his foot into the stirrup, he looked 
again : she was standing in the same place, 
laughing still. 

"You go," she cried, waving him good-by. 
"There ll not be a soul to disturb you! To 
morrow at four o clock!" 

"Will you be there?" he said. 

" Will you ? " she answered. 

"I ll be there to-morrow!" he said, "and 
every other day till you come." 



XI 

AN old ash-tree with a double trunk stood 
on the rear edge of the strip of woods where 
Daphne s father put his steers for summer 
pasture. Other forest trees grew near by; 
and past them ran the fence, low and rot 
ting, which marked the troublesome boundary 
line between her father s and Hilary s farms. 
Blackberry bushes throve rank in some of 
the fence corners ; in others poke-root towered 
amid low forests of the may-apple. Pawpaw- 
trees made a thicket on one side; and out in 
the pasture the ironweed, not cut until Au 
gust, spread its purple fringes far above the 
grass. 

No foot-path led that way. Chipmunks 
chased each other along the rails, gray and 
green in lichens, without a shriek, and scam 
per at the discovery of a looker-on. The 
1 06 



Summer in Arcady 107 

sound of reapers in the nearest fields had 
a muffled faintness. 

Toward this spot about five o clock the 
following afternoon Daphne with simple trust 
was taking her way. From the moment when 
Hilary had opened up the possibility of her 
meeting him in secret, from the moment of 
believing that he was fond of her, life had 
become a new thing to Daphne and the 
world a better place. A home and past like 
hers had made little appeal to the better 
traits in her character; but neither had it 
yet destroyed them ; and at once love be 
gan to soften and irradiate and ennoble her 
as it softens and irradiates and ennobles 
every soul who is able and worthy to feel 
it. She was kinder to them at home that 
day. When her father came in before din 
ner, hot and thirsty, she had ready for him 
a pitcher of lemonade the drops standing 
like a heavy dew on the old Bohemian glass 
and a fragrance exhaling from the thin half- 
moons of lemon ; and she brought it out on 
the porch to him as a surprise and with a 



io8 Summer in Arcady 

novel playfulness. He drank the lemonade 
but did not thank her or notice her. His 
repulse caused her to turn with a fresh feel 
ing of justification to this secret intercourse 
with Hilary. 

As she entered the woods through a meadow, 
a butterfly, stirred from the weeds by her threat 
ening feet, whirled itself upward into the wide, 
hot air and entered the woods also. Nature at 
that moment made no great difference between 
the insect and the girl in her instructions. She 
said to the butterfly : " Enter this woods. You 
may find what you seek rest, honey, compan 
ionship." And she said to Daphne: "Enter 
this woods. You may find what you seek 
rest from your restlessness, happiness, compan 
ionship." If the butterfly could have been 
asked why it cared for honey and for another 
butterfly of the opposite sex more than for any 
thing else in the world, or why it was under the 
necessity of doing as Nature prompted it, there 
could have been no reply : and no more could a 
reply have been given to a like question by the 
child. But if the butterfly could have reasoned 



Summer in Arcady 109 

concerning the butterfly lot, its philosophy 
would perhaps have fallen into this strain : 

"Truly among created things on this planet 
my life is the most unhappy. I alight with 
famishing zest upon one flower; others have 
been there before. I discover a fresh, splendid 
blossom that no one has touched : it is set so 
far inward among stems and thorns as to be out 
of my reach. I begin to drink at the brimming 
heart of a third, and lo ! it is an old raindrop, 
bitter with rotting leaves. Entire days pass of 
heavenly brightness when I fly and fly and fly 
over fields without a blossom ; then follow cold, 
wet ones, when I must lie hidden and wait. 
The least wind all but tears my wings from my 
body. I am made for perpetual calm, yet 
inhabit an earth of unending storms. Even to 
live, I must travel; no sooner have I moved my 
wings than I attract the attention of my ene 
mies. There is no end of my perils and woes ; 
and altogether, I am of all winged creatures 
least adapted to live on this globe. The upshot 
of the whole truth is that Nature allots me some 
moments of happiness during my one uncertain 



no Summer in Arcady 

summer and impels me to make the most of 
these. So I do. I never decline honey when I 
want it and can get it." 

Daphne would have given quite as simple 
account of why she was now going to meet 
Hilary in the woods. Not to have gone would 
have been like wasting one of the few chances 
of happiness in her unhappy life like declin 
ing a new kind of delicious wild honey which 
Nature bade her seek as the chief thing in all 
the world. 

She did not dream that she might be crossing 
the invisible boundary between moral light and 
darkness, or that she was advancing gaily 
toward those wastes of life over which women 
wander lost and die damned. If she could 
have known of the countless company of her 
sisters who have taken their first step toward 
the central tragedy of the world by doing what 
she now did going to the first secret meeting 
with the men they have loved if there could 
have flitted before her the vast pageant of the 
painted butterflies of her race, painted and torn 
and weary, and drooping all at last into the 



Summer in Arcady 1 1 1 

same foul mire she might well have recoiled 
and tottered homeward an old woman, wrinkled 
with horror, her dark braids turned to snow. 

But it was with Daphne this day as it has 
been with so many of the others. She had not 
yet learned what no woman who feels it can 
ever afterwards forget the fear of herself. 
She had learned still less that a woman will 
risk herself with a man as though he had not 
himself to conquer or not to conquer. She lent 
her ear wholly to Nature who sat within her 
and played upon the ancient beguiling pipes of 
youth and innocence and trust and love. Many 
a girl has arisen from her seat wherever she 
has been in the world and gone out to answer 
these summonses as though they were divine. 
As for those great, solemn voices of warning 
that sound out in many other women at such 
moments those despairing revengeful voices 
that perhaps sound in all women when it is 
too late they were silent in this child. Even 
the bell of the divine casting that hangs in the 
mortal belfry of the soul tolled no alarm ; the 
bell hung there, but motionless. 



112 Summer in Arcady 

She was very lovely as she passed through 
the sunlight and shadow of the trees lovelier 
than any psyche of the sun floating with moons 
of velvet jet on wings of heaven s blue love 
liest with the look of love thrilling in her; 
and no wild, lithe, gray leaper from tree-top 
to tree-top was ever more palpitant with animal 
life. 

As she drew near the group of forest trees, 
she kept herself screened behind the ironweed 
and pawpaw-bushes. Some one else might be 
there. Would he be there ? About ten yards 
off she paused and peeped through the thick 
boughs. 

He was sitting at the root of the ash-tree 
with his face turned toward the opening 
through which he expected her to come. On 
the grass beside him lay his riding-gloves. On 
his knees, which were drawn up before him, he 
held a memorandum book, and in this he was 
scribbling. Now and then he would raise his 
eyes and watch for her, and frown with disap 
pointment, and return to his lead-pencil. 

Her eyes dwelt on him eagerly ; her heart 



Summer in Arcady 113 

beat loudly in her ears ; an unwonted shyness 
urged her to slip away unseen. 

A rabbit sat in its bed in the deep grass a 
few feet from where she stood, and growing 
suspicious of her, that she did not move on, 
leaped softly forth and ran across the open 
space past the tree to the fence behind. As it 
bounded by Hilary he threw his gloves at it 
from old boyish habit, and then, with a loud 
laugh, went and raked them out from under 
the briers. When he returned to the tree 
again, she was sitting quietly in his place. 

" I thought you were never coming," she 
cried, mocking him reproachfully. 

He stood staring at her in ludicrous surprise 
and delight. 

"How did you get here?" he exclaimed. 
"Ride on that rabbit?" 

" I rode on my two little white ones," she 
replied, daintily smoothing her skirts forward to 
cover her feet, as he threw himself down before 
her. 

"The little white rabbits must be awfully 
tired." 



114 Slimmer in Arcady 

"They are." 

"Then they ll have to rest here a long time." 

" Of course ! For hours and hours ! " 

" Is this the first time the little white rabbits 
were ever in the woods ? " 

"They ve been in a poor little cage ever 
since they were born. Didn t you know 
that ? " 

" And didn t they ever get tired of the cage 
before ? " 

"Oh, awfully tired." 

" And now they are never going to be satis 
fied to stay in the cage again, are they ? " 

" No, never ! " 

"But what s going to become of them? 
Where are they going to stay ? " 

" Oh they ll find a place somewhere ! " 

" Don t you know there are a great many 
big dogs in the world that eat up little white 
rabbits ? " 

" Do they ? How dreadful ! And what be 
comes of these big dogs ? " 

"Oh nothing! They just eat up some 
more ! " 



Summer in Arcady 115 

" Poor little rabbits ! If mine were to see one 
of these dogs, how they would run ! " 

He laughed and lay on his back, watching 
her contentedly. 

" What were you writing ? " she asked with 
a gay threat some minutes later. " I saw you 
writing." 

"A note to you. I thought you were not 
coming. I was going to send it to you." 

"Then give it to me it s mine!" 

He drew out of his breast pocket a thick, old 
memorandum book and pulled off the strap. 

It was a curious little book of his personal 
history. He had bought it upon his father s 
death, when he had come to the head of affairs, 
and begun to equip himself with things that 
gratified his idea of a young farmer s impor 
tance. About half of it was now taken up with 
such items as the price of agricultural imple 
ments, the number of bushels of grain to the 
acre, and the date of foals ; but the last part 
was filled with other things. 

In it were scribbled the names of a good 
many girls ; on some of the pages a great many 



n6 Summer in Arcady 

times the names of a few girls ; on others the 
name of one girl had been written over and 
over. There were little confessions to some 
that had relieved his heart and delighted his 
eye with their air of confidential reality at the 
moment of writing them. Sometimes, also, 
when he had been riding in a buggy with a girl, 
to a church or to a picnic, and the way was 
long and the horse was tired, he had feigned 
to be far away from her, and had scribbled 
notes to her that became a thousand times more 
telling because of that intoxicating sham be 
cause of that hopeless distance between them, 
while his shoulder lay against hers and their 
breaths mingled. He had done the same thing 
on long, black mohair sofas in parlours of a Sun 
day afternoon, availing himself of the dim light 
that came through the slits of the blinds and 
the shutters. And he had done the same thing 
in church with the help of a hymn-book, a hand 
kerchief, or a palm-leaf fan all the time keep 
ing a pious eye on the preacher and looking 
remorseful about his sins. 

He searched among the pages until he found 



Summer in Arcady 117 

the note he had just written, and lay back again 
watching her. 

It was her first love-letter. Imagine a fawn 
that for days has been wandering lost and 
athirst over rock and plain, but at last in some 
green woodland solitude sees the brink of a 
cold lake and one of the herd browsing near. 
More than water to thirst, or reunion with kind 
was this letter to Daphne. Among the things 
that he had written, he had set down his real 
disappointment that she had not met him, and 
he had added his determination to see her, no 
matter who forbade. Nevertheless, to him the 
scrap of paper meant something less than love. 
To her it was a sacred scroll, bidding her to 
enter the old, old earthly paradise. 

As she finished reading it, she could not look 
at him. The flush of her own inward confes 
sion dyed her neck and face and brow. In 
her embarrassment her fingers began to turn 
over the leaves and her eyes to fall upon other 
names and other notes. 

"Are these for me, also? " she asked simply. 

He sprang up, turning a deep red. 



Ii8 Summer in Arcady 

"Give it here," he cried, trying to take the 
book from her. 

"No! " cried Daphne, laughing. "You gave 
it to me to read ! " 

In a moment he was on his knees before her 
and had imprisoned her hand with the book in 
it. With the other he drew the book out and 
put it into his pocket. Then all at once the 
same unforeseen desire that had thrilled him 
that day in the meadow the same unforeseen 
desire that had come over him as he braided the 
ring on her hand the day before now rose in 
him with overmastering strength, and he held 
her hand. 

" Don t, Hilary ! " she said sweetly, with a 
little wince of pain. " Let me go. You hurt 
me ! " 

He caught her other hand. 

" Hilary ! " she cried again, with a deeper 
rebuke in her voice, falling backward against 
the tree and struggling to release her hands. 

He tried to draw her to him with a low, 
caressing laugh. 

" Hilary ! Hilary ! " she cried, resisting him 



Slimmer in Arcady 119 

with a sudden terror of his advances, his rough 
tenderness, the torrent of his feelings. Then 
with one awful thought, and the strength it 
gave her, she struggled out of his arms to her 
feet, and stood supporting herself with one 
hand against the tree. He rose, and they con 
fronted each other. The great solemn voices 
were sounding now : the divine bell was tolling 
now. Her face seemed cut from marble, and 
her eyes were full of fright and distress. 

He looked at her, pale, without a word. 

Then, as if realizing what she must do, she 
started homeward. 

He sprang after her with a bitter cry to 
her. 

She turned, her figure drawn quickly tense 
and her eyes filling with a calm, sad light. He 
could no more have spoken again, or taken one 
step, than he could have pulled up the oak-tree 
near him and offered it to her as a flower of 
apology. And so he stood watching her as she 
walked falteringly away from him until, gather 
ing all her strength for one effort, she broke 
into a run, and tripped and fell, and got weakly 



I2O Summer in Arcady 

up with one quick, frightened glance back at 
him, and then ran on. 

For the first time in many years feeling that 
her home would be like heaven to reach, she 
fled through the woods. 

When she had gained the house unnoticed, 
she passed as noiselessly as a shadow to her 
room, locked the door, and threw herself across 
the foot of her bed. Then reaching for a 
pillow, and drawing it with a tight clutch down 
over her face, she lay there. 

The sun sank low, and its level rays coming 
through the little, green shutters kissed pityingly 
the shoes on her feet. One by one the sounds 
came on that mark the close of a summer day 
in the country : the calling of the cattle home 
and the bleat of calves at the milking ; the jan 
gling of trace-chains in the quiet, darkening 
air, as the workmen return from the fields to 
the barn; the cutting of oats for the horses; 
the last peaceful quarrels of the fowls going to 
roost in the trees about the yard ; the play of 
the young negroes up at the woodpile ; the shuf 
fling of feet busy about the wash-basin on the 



Summer in Arcady 121 

porches below ; and the loud beating of the bis 
cuit and the grinding of coffee in the kitchen. 
Then the setting of the supper-table out on the 
porch, and the dragging of the chairs to their 
places ; and across the big, white stones in the 
yard the careful tread of other feet, bringing the 
milk and butter from the cool spring-house. 

At last her mother s voice a meek, quaver 
ing treble sounded at the foot of the stairs : 

" Daphne, why don t you come to your 
supper ? " 

Ah ! if she had had the right kind of a 
mother, all this would never have happened. 

After an interval, bare feet rushed up the 
stairway, and impatient hands tried the door, 
and voices sounded through the keyhole. 

" Daphne, you d better come to your sup 
per." 

After another interval her father s voice, 
stern, inquiring, rose from the foot of the 
stair : 

" Daphne ? " 

There was no answer. 

" Daphne?" 



122 Summer in Arcady 

There was no answer. 

Then his heavy, awkward tread came up the 
steps, his toes kicking against the brass rods, 
and his hand shaking the knob violently. 

"Daphne?" 

She opened the door. 

" What s the matter with you?" he said 
harshly and taking her by the arm led her over 
to the western window. 

But when they reached it, she turned her 
face from the low light, and forgetting the past 
all his coldness, all his unkindness, all the 
wrong she threw her arms around his neck 
and hid her face on his bosom with a bitter 
cry: 

"Oh, father! father! father! You are all 
that I have in the world." 

Her voice pierced even him; and putting 
his arms around her, the hard, grisly man, for 
the first time in his life, strained her to his 
breast and cried out in broken tones over her 
head : 

"My poor child! What has happened to 
you?" 



XII 

A CRYSTAL spring gurgled out of the lime 
stone near the foot of the hill on which Daphne s 
home had been built by a pioneer forefather. 
The mouth of this spring had been enlarged 
and the earth dug away, allowing the water to 
spread over a flat basin of rock. From the 
lower edge of this it tinkled away through a 
mossy trough to the branch in the lot below. 
Over this basin of rock a spring-house had been 
built ; large round stones placed here and there 
for the feet ; and sunk in the dark, cold water 
were crocks and tins, keeping the milk and 
butter sweet in the fashion of times and man 
ners now nearly gone. A foot-path ran down 
to the spring-house through the back yard and 
past an old orchard of apple and peach trees. 

Toward dusk one evening, about two weeks 
later, Daphne had gone down, as often her 
123 



124 Summer in Arcady 

custom was, to skim the milk for supper : the 
negro girl was soon to come for it. 

But when she had entered the spring-house, 
she paused among the crocks and tins, lost in 
her thoughts. She had not had many thoughts 
in those two long, long weeks poor Daphne ! 
but the few she had never left her. 

She was freshly dressed in a simple home 
frock of white. The ends of her long braids 
were tied together with a blue riband. A spray 
of heliotrope laid its fragrance on her round 
breast. She breathed the purity of a primrose 
that has just opened in the cool twilight grass. 
The gray-green light of the room, reflected 
from the white walls and from the moss of the 
rocks, threw upon her face a pallor that made 
its sadness very touching. 

Seeing her standing thus, slender and still 
and white on the low, green stones as though 
poised on the leaves of the lotus, with only the 
voice of the tiny spring rippling on the silence 
as it struggled out of its caverns, the fancy for 
got who she was and where she was and fell to 
dreaming of those faint, far shapes that in the 



Summer in Arcady 125 

youth of the world s imagination haunted the 
borderland of mystery and reality. What was 
she but a nymph of the fountain, brought by 
some late disaster to ponder the secrets of life 
and nature ? Or drawing her comfort from the 
little spring, whose fate it was to fall clear from 
the skies ; to run a little way over the earth 
now in light, now in darkness, gathering many 
stains ; and at last to be drawn back home to 
the skies, clear once more ? 

She had stood thus only a few minutes when 
her ear caught the sound of feet on the stones 
outside. The next moment a figure darkened 
the doorway : she turned dreamily ; it was 
Hilary. 

He came down the few steps that led to the 
basin of rock and walked to the edge of it and 
stopped there, looking across at her with his 
face full of trouble. 

She forgot her anger ; forgot her humiliation ; 
forgot the anguish in which she had lived since 
they had parted ; forgot his boldness in daring 
to seek her in such a place and at such an hour, 
and the consequences to them both if he were 



126 Summer in Arcady 

discovered. She forgot everything but the joy 
of seeing him again which made itself felt 
beyond any power of help or hindrance. 

But she grew as cold as though her feet were 
freezing to the rocks and her large, mournful, 
startled eyes put between him and her a dis 
tance that was not to be crossed. 

"I have been trying to see you," he said, 
" trying every day every day for two weeks. 
But you would not give me a chance : you have 
stayed at home. I understand ! I am not blam 
ing you ! But I can t stand it any longer ! If I 
had not seen you to-day, I was coming to the 
house to-morrow ! I don t care ! " he cried with 
a gesture of uncontrollable feeling as he saw a 
new look of fear on her face. "I was coming! " 
and as he spoke, for the first time there rang 
out in his voice his real love of her. 

Nature had been having her way with him as 
an animal during these days of waiting; but 
something else had begun to have its way also 
something that we satisfy ourselves by call 
ing not earthly and of the body, but unearthly 
and of the soul something that is not pursuit 



Summer in Arcady 127 

and enjoyment of another, but self-sacrifice for 
another s sake that does not bring satiety 
but ever-growing dearness onward through 
youth and joy into old age and sorrow that 
remains faithful when the one of two sits warm 
in the sun and the other lies cold in the shadow 
that burns on and on as a faithful lonely 
flame in a worn-out broken lamp and that 
asks, when everything else is over, for a life 
throughout eternity, spirit with spirit. 

The change in him was unmistakable. She 
understood ; and in a moment the whole past 
against him was blotted out. 

He stepped upon the rocks toward her. 

She stretched out one of her hands with a 
gesture of remonstrance. 

"Go back!" she said faintly. 

But he came on over and stood close be 
fore her and looked her imploringly in the 
eyes. 

" I cant go away ! " he said. " I under 
stand how you feel ! But you must try to 
understand how I feel, Daphne ! Try to 
understand everything ! " 



128 Summer in Arcady 

"I can t talk to you here," she answered 
pleadingly. " If you will only go away ! . . . 
They will be coming here in a minute . . . 
they will see you ! " 

" I am going back to the house with you," 
he replied stubbornly. " I am going to ask 
your father and mother for you ... if you 
will only say ..." 

"No! No!" she cried. "It would only 
make it worse worse for me ! They have 
threatened me ! . . . If I meet you again, 
they are going to send me away to some 
school for a year two three years ! 
Will you go for my sake ? " 

"They shall not send you away!" he 
replied. "It is not for them it is for you 
to say." 

"Oh, then, if you care for me don t stay 
here any longer." 

" But when can I see you ? " 

"Only give me time to think." 

" I will not go till you promise to meet me 
again ! Will you come to the back of the 
pasture to-morrow ? " 



Summer in Arcady 129 

"I can t! I can t promise that." 

" Don t you trust me now, Daphne ? " 

" Oh, yes, yes ! But will you go ? " 

"Will you come to-morrow?" 

"I will see you somewhere soon!" 

" No ! " he cried. " To-morrow ! I must 

see you to-morrow! I ll wait for you. If you 

are not there, I am coming to the house." 
"If you loved me," she said with a quick 

reproachful gesture, " you would go away 

now ! " 

He turned and went out. 



XIII 

SHE went to the rear of the pasture the next 
afternoon and found him waiting; and after 
that she met him there every few days, some 
times daily. 

A pair of butterflies out of their countless 
kind had met on the meadows of life and, 
forgetting all others, were beginning to cling. 
The time was not far off when Nature would 
demand her crisis that ever old, ever new 
miracle of the dust through which the perish 
able becomes the enduring, and the individual 
of a moment renews itself into a type for 
ages. 

The crisis came on in beauty. The noon 
of summer now was nigh. Each day the 
great tawny sun became a more fierce and 
maddening lover of the earth, and flushed her 
more deeply, and awoke in her throes of re 
sponsive energy, until the whole land seemed 
130 



Summer in Arcady 131 

to burn with colour and to faint in its own 
sweetness. 

And this high aerial miracle of two floating 
spheres that swept all life along in the flow 
of its tide, caught the boy as a running sea 
catches a weed. 

He began to lose energy and interest in 
his work. He would go out to the fields and 
forget everything, or not care ; and throwing 
himself down in the shade of a tree, lie with 
his hat over his eyes until the dinner-horn 
sounded faint and clear, calling him home. 
When night fell he was restless and away, 
riding back late and slowly, not having 
spoken with any one. The mare s nervous 
ears often questioned his silent lips, and her 
eyes glanced uneasily backward at his figure, 
with its hands folded over the pommel of his 
saddle, and the moonlight shining on his face, 
serious and still. When he had turned her 
out, he sat for a long time smoking, and his 
mother s unseen fan often stirred the air 
softly about his face like the wing of a hov 
ering bird. But he addressed few or no 



132 Summer in Arcady 

words to her; and at last with a wound at 
the change in him, but with no questions and 
with no suspicion of the cause, lingeringly she 
left him to his mood. Then his setter would 
creep nearer and lay her head heavily across 
his lap, uttering her reproachful whine. More 
than one sweet girl of the neighbourhood slipt 
out into her porch during the fragrant twi 
lights of these days and waited for the sound 
of a front gate being opened; but he did not 
come. And in a private street of the town not 
far away a richly furnished house, with lighted 
windows kept well curtained and closed, also 
missed him greatly and persistently. 

All women to him had become Daphne in 
the woods. 

At first he had urged her to let him speak to 
her father and mother and end the secrecy, but 
she had counselled that this would be worse 
than cruelty to her ; they disliked him bitterly ; 
she was a child. He was a child also, she 
added ; but the look with which she said this 
was not the look that one child gives an 
other. For both reasons her father would 



Summer in Arcady 133 

separate them at once ; and at the mere thought 
of her separation from him she betrayed how 
her life now clung to his. He reflected for 
his own part upon the folly of marrying at 
his age, with no roof of his own to shelter her, 
and with his mother s certain anger and prob 
able refusal to receive them even for a while 
into her home. 

Thus they continued to meet, and he realized 
that she did not understand the constantly in 
creasing danger. 

For she had greatly changed. At the open 
ing of June, but a few weeks before, she had 
been of a fretful and rebellious temper, dis 
satisfied with her surroundings, without a tie in 
life that kept her in constant activity, and there 
fore in constant rest. But under that rapid 
growth which some women undergo when the 
revelation of Nature has fallen upon them for 
the first time, and with the explanation it gives 
of so many things, all her vague yearnings had 
taken rigid order or sunk into nothingness 
around this single passion. She, too, had 
behind her generations of immoral forefathers, 



134 Summer in Arcady 

each of whom in weakening the moral fibre of 
his own nature had helped to weaken hers. It 
was along the edge of the sad immemorial har 
vests sown by them that her wayward feet were 
straying. 

And now the thought preyed ceaselessly 
upon him of how another man in his place 
might use his advantage. 

But it aroused in him, at least, the greater 
care that his own power over her should be 
come her defender. He did not forget that 
she had been drawn into this false situation by 
his urgency; and whatever else he may not 
have had, he had the spirit of fair play. Her 
absolute trust of him alone would have put him 
upon his honour, even had not the first impulse 
of his love been to draw about her the circle of 
sacredness. Perhaps something in his dissolute 
past had already taught him that a man s love 
for a woman is bound up with his knowledge 
or at least his belief of her purity. 

There were days when he scarcely dared see 
her ; and not once had he so much as touched 
her hands, except at meeting and at parting. 



Summer in Arcady 135 

At times he was grave and silent, as though 
he were revolving some plan for them in the 
knowledge of which he allowed her no share ; 
at other times indeed always he struck her 
as being secretly troubled. If she sought to 
question him, he was rude and cross with her. 
She misunderstood the change in him, and was 
deeply wounded ; and her old wretched doubts 
of him returned. Was this the beginning of 
coldness and withdrawal ? Did he care for her 
after all ? No woman feels sure in such a case 
and the case has many forms in life what 
it is that has attracted a man, or how long and 
at what a price she can hold him. 

Thus her love rose in her like a spring that 
must overflow in the end, and he lay beside the 
spring with a parched tongue. 

One afternoon as he was riding along that 
side of his farm, he hitched his mare and 
walked across to the spot where they were in 
the habit of meeting. Once she had asked him 
whether he ever came to it when she was not 
there, and he had said that he often felt like 
coming. 



136 Summer in Arcady 

She was there already. The afternoon before 
they had shifted their position under the trees 
to avoid the sun, and had gone to a fresh place 
in the cool grass. When they had risen, she 
had laughed at the print of his figure. 

She lay in this print of his figure now, 
with her face buried in her hands. Some 
thing in her attitude made him feel sure that 
she was praying. He left the place quickly, 
noiselessly, with a new awe of her. 

That night as he sat alone on the porch, 
his thoughts returned to this scene. What 
impulse had drawn her to the place? And 
of what could she be praying? Was the 
struggle going on in her nature, as in his, 
the same struggle ? 

Over the tree-tops the stars of the southern 
summer night were glowing with chaste fire. 
The flowers about the yard were releasing 
their last fragrance to the night ; and from 
their hiding-places under the leaves, beneath 
the grass, in the crevices of the roof and the 
walls, everywhere, the butterflies of the earth s 
shadow with wings of silver and breasts of 



Summer in Arcady 137 

snow were hurrying to the blossoms, circling 
about their loves, pursuing and meeting each 
other in the languorous darkness. 

He had been of their roving kind using 
their freedom, lacking their innocence a 
seeker of the fast-fading buds of the night. 

Nature had never made him of the highest 
or for the highest, and he had already fallen 
a good deal lower than he was made ; but of 
late the linking of his life to a pure one, in 
duty and in desire, had helped him in his 
struggle to do what was right. The recollec 
tion of the scene of to-day touched him most 
deeply, and perhaps during these moments he 
realized as far as was possible to him now, 
that the happiness of a man s life lies and 
must always lie where a woman s lies. 

But on the shifting sands of a false past 
and with hands little fitted for the work, he 
was making his first sincere but blundering 
effort to rear a barrier of a moral resistance 
as the safeguard of two lives. And far out on 
the deeps of life Nature, like a great bury 
ing wave, was rolling shoreward toward him. 



XIV 

LOVELY June had gone and nearly all July. 
It was Saturday and for an hour or more the 
shadows of things had been lengthening east 
ward. 

A great circus had come to town that day. 
From early morning a band of white dust, be 
ginning on the green horizon at the north and 
disappearing on the green horizon at the south, 
had hung over the turnpike, marking the pas 
sage of vehicles and horsemen. At every sta 
tion the train had taken on gaily dressed, merry 
people. 

Quiet as if Sunday rest had fallen upon the 
fields. A plough lay at the end of a furrow, 
the earth still undried upon the mole, the gear 
pitched among the weeds in the fence corner, 
the horses scarce done drinking at the pond in 
the woods and wearing the sweat mark of the 
collar on their necks. A yoke of oxen stood 
138 



Slimmer in Arcady 139 

resting under a mighty elm, the loaded wagon 
left in the far-away fields, beside the unfinished 
wheat stack. For miles in every direction hardly 
a voice or a human presence on the landscape, 
except perhaps the slumberous singing of an 
old negro at work with a loving hoe among 
the watermelon vines or the sweet potatoes. 

Upon many of the homesteads a quiet greater 
still some closed, door and shutter, and not 
a soul remaining. Here a barn door had been 
left unbolted, so that the calves had gotten in 
and were tearing the yellow heads of the new 
oats; there a garden gate unlatched, and the 
fowls were scratching up the late peas and 
sinking their bills into the red tomatoes. In 
the cabin door of one farm-house under her 
gourd-vines and sunflowers, a granny might 
have been sitting, her fillet of white wool silver 
ing in the sunbeams between her ebon brow 
and scarlet turban, her clawlike finger on the 
bowl of her pipe, a babe asleep across her 
knees. On the porch at another house, in 
the shadow of the Catawba grape-vines, an 
old farmer dozed solitary in his sock feet and 



140 Summer in Arcady 

unbuttoned waistcoat ; or he having passed 
away his wife, with her Bible in her lap and 
heavy spectacles on her dim eyes, sat softly 
rocking, and knitting, and praying, soon to 
be with him in the world of eternal youth. 

Upon the midsummer woods most of all lay 
brooding stillness and subtle relaxing heat. In 
the depths of one the moo of a restless heifer 
broke at intervals upon the ear like a faint, 
far bell of distress. The squirrel hid asleep. 
The cuckoo barely lilted in silky flight among 
the trees. The mourning moth lay on the 
thistle with flattened wings as still as death. 
The blue snake-doctor had dropped on the 
brink of the green pool like a lost jewel. Amid 
such silence in a forest, the imagination takes 
on the belief that all things in Nature under 
stand and are waiting for some one to come 
for something to happen that they will all 
feel. 

Daphne glided like a swift, noiseless shadow 
into the woods. 

It was partly by reason of her doubt of him 
that she had arranged their meeting for this 



Summer in Arcady 141 

afternoon. He had been telling her that he 
was going to the circus ; and she had jealously 
watched the eagerness with which he looked 
forward to that pleasure. He had been keenly 
disappointed therefore when she had named 
this day and he had begged her to set another ; 
but she had refused, and at last he had said 
that this day it should be. 

To avoid suspicion, he was to drive to town 
in the morning, let himself be seen on the 
streets by the people from the neighbourhood, 
and allow it to be taken for granted that he 
was going to the circus. He was to come out 
by another turnpike, drive across through a 
lane, and hitch his buggy somewhere near the 
woods. Daphne was to remain at home with 
her grandmother the country would be de 
serted they would have the whole afternoon 
to themselves. 

But when she now reached the edge of 
the pawpaw thicket and peeped through the 
branches, there was no one sitting at the foot 
of the ash-tree. She stepped anxiously into 
the open space and looked about her. With 



142 Summer in Arcady 

a sweet smile of discovery she ran to the tree 
and peeped behind. Then she stood with her 
hand against it, overcome with disappointment. 
But he might be hiding somewhere near. 

" Hilary ! " she cried. 

Her voice was so faint that it could have 
penetrated only a few yards. Amid the deep 
silence of the woods it terrified her as though 
it could be heard back at the house. But 
there was something worse now than even the 
fear of being heard. 

" Hilary ! " she cried more loudly. Of all 
those little appeals that the women send out 
for the men in such cases for the men who 
do not intend to come none could ever have 
been more distressing. 

A ground-squirrel that had been watching 
her from between two fence rails darted with 
a shriek into his hole. It gave her a great 
start, and out of sheer weakness she sat down. 
Then she bent her ear, listening. Only the 
bell-like moo in her father s pasture. 

The world was suddenly to Daphne as if 
sackcloth had been drawn over the sun. 



Summer in Arcady 143 

The temptation to stay in town had been too 
great: he was not coming. He knew that 
she would be there, waiting ; but that was noth 
ing to him. He was tired of her, and had de 
serted her, as she had always known that he 
would. She drew her knees up and laid her 
sick, white face over on them. 

Then there was the sound of feet hurrying 
nearer, and the snapping of dried twigs under 
the grass ; then the breaking of a rail on the 
fence, as a heavy weight was thrown reck 
lessly upon it ; and then he hurried round into 
the open space, and when he saw her, stopped 
short, with his hat in his hand and the worried 
expression on his face vanishing as though he 
had stepped from shadow into sunlight. 

In an instant she noticed as in their un 
like ways women do little changes in his 
appearance which left him more attractive in 
her rustic eyes : he had on a new suit of clothes 
which made him look cool and sweet ; he had had 
his hair cut and was freshly shaved, so that his 
face wore the freshness of a child s that still has 
the wholesome fragrance of the bath upon it. 



144 Summer in Arcady 

The happiness of knowing that she had 
wronged him that he had given up every 
thing for the sake of coming back to her 
that he was hers absolutely wrought the 
betrayal of Daphne s self-control. She was 
taken off her guard. Her love swept her on 
like a flood. With a cry of gratitude and de 
light she ran to him, but checked herself, and 
merely caught his hand and kissed it again 
and again, and pressed it to her bosom, and 
laid her cheek down on it and held it there, 
closing her eyes to hide her tears. 

And this in her was so sudden and so 
maddening to him that, taken off his guard 
also his long self-restraint swept away 
with a low answering cry he threw his arms 
around her and drew her form in against his. 
Then, bending her slowly backward, his face 
close over her face, he pressed his lips to 
hers. 

The young trust themselves alone with Nat 
ure, who cares only for life and nothing for 
the higher things that make life worth the liv 
ing. To them who understand her deadly 



Slimmer in Arcady 145 

approaches she can come least near with the 
power to harm. When her low storm threat 
ens, they can rise to higher strongholds, per 
haps to the great calm crags of spiritual re 
treat, and look down with pity upon her havoc 
in the plain. But the young, who have not 
learned and do not suspect, these from the 
creation of the world she has been engulfing 
as those who once walked between walls of 
water. 

How still the woods were all around ! How 
still the trees were overhead. For centuries 
their roots, their boughs and buds and heart 
fibres, had witnessed the love histories of the 
irresponsible little creatures of earth and air 
that had come and gone, countless and for 
gotten, like their own leaves. Never had Nat 
ure driven to them such an earthly pair, two 
ephemera of immortal destinies. 

How still the woods were, except that not 
far away, in Hilary s pasture, a wild, danger 
ous bull, whose blood was raging, paused once 
as he roved nearer and listened, his head in 
the air ; then with a deep answering roar came 



146 Summer in Arcady 

hurrying on : a vast bulk with noble arching 
neck covered with red curls ; red curls about 
the base of his crescent horns; a central sun 
of white curls between his sullen, majestic 
eyes ; his head now swung low ; the snowy 
fringes of his tail rippling far behind across 
the grass and weeds. 

Straight on toward the still trees he moved, 
with the lash of his feet through the grass, 
and the snapping of vines across his resist 
less brows straight on toward a panel of the 
fence where the briers were short and the top 
rail broken. The pause of an instant there ; 
then his awful weight was lifted, and came 
crushing down. 

With a cry of alarm Hilary sprang up and 
stood between him and Daphne. But the great 
glad beast, looking neither to the right nor to 
the left, and with one announcing roar, swept 
past them. 

When Hilary turned, Daphne had risen and 
gone. She had sunk on the grass some yards 
away, and she had hidden her face in her 
hands and was crying bitterly. 



Summer in Arcady 147 

He did not go to her. He did not know 
what to do, or what he was doing. He walked 
mechanically around to the broken panel and 
stood looking over into his pasture, seeing 
everything, and seeing nothing. 

He was like a traveller who has passed from 
the radiance of moonlight into the blackness 
of a tempest and been blinded by a red flame 
in his face ; so that for a moment he does not 
feel his feet under him, or know his road, but 
stands with the crash of the heavens in his 
ears, and a sense of his helplessness amid 
the forces of Nature that are freeing them 
selves without any concern for his life or his 
death. But even while he stands thus per 
haps the next minute a few rays may strug 
gle down into the pit of darkness, recalling 
him to his path and to what reigns on above 
the storm. 

He came around from behind the briers 
and hurried across the open space to where 
Daphne sat; and, dropping on one knee be 
fore her, he began to speak to her. He had 
the air of a man who has thrown away every- 



148 Summer in Arcady 

thing for the sake of one only. At first she 
did not hear or heed ; later she listened. Then 
for a few minutes longer they spoke together 
passionately, he pleading, she refusing; after 
which he got up and walked to and fro, while 
she buried her face in her hands again. Then 
he glanced at his watch, and with an exclama 
tion returned to her. 

"There s only a little time left, Daphne!" 
he said imploringly. "We barely have time 
before the train passes. We can arrange 
everything on the way to the station. There 
is no one to stop us. Will you go with me ? " 

She did not answer. 

He got down on his knee again and laid 
his hand tenderly on her head and urged her 
yet another time: 

"We can get to Aberdeen to-night. . . . 
We can be married to-night. . . . Won t you 
go with me, Daphne ? " 

Still she did not answer. So that he rose 
and stood looking down upon her in silence. 
His one thought was the danger they had 
just escaped, and the one duty before him, as 



Summer in Arcady 149 

he saw it now, was clear as noonday. When 
he spoke again, it was with a sudden wrench 
of nature. 

" Then, Daphne, I am going to tell you 
good-by now ! " 

She sprang up and came close, and looked 
him piercingly in the eyes. 

" What do you mean ? " she said. 

"I mean," he answered, "that you must go 
with me, and marry me now, or we must not 
meet in this way any more." 

"Oh!" she cried, clasping her hands to 
her heart and looking at him piteously. 

"Daphne," he cried, "your father will 
never consent. ... If we are ever to marry, 
we ll have to go in this way. But if you 
will not go," he added with a forced harsh 
ness that he had never used to her before, 
"then go home." 

She stood, her tears arrested, her lips quiv 
ering, her eyes searching his face miserably. 

"You mean," she asked at length, slowly, 
" that you will not meet me here 
any more ? " 



150 Summer in Arcady 

-No." 

She closed her eyes, and a shiver passed 
through her as though his words had cut her 
like a lance. Then she came a step nearer to 
him, with a fear in her eyes that was awful to 
see ; and in the same slow way she asked again : 

" You mean that you will not 
meet me anywhere any more ? " 

" No ! " he cried again with blind impetuos 
ity and the same forced harshness. 

There was no playground in the summer 
woods for them now but a bare foothold on 
a steep mountain rock; the right and the 
wrong of life and death yawned near them. 

" Marry me now ! " he cried for the last 
time and with a warning. 

She stood bending slightly toward him, look 
ing beyond him into the future if she yielded. 
She foresaw the unforgiveness of her father 
and mother, which would last through life ; the 
anger of his mother, whom she dreaded; the 
long distance to be travelled, and the risk of 
their being stopped on the way ; the river to 
be crossed ; the uncertainty of getting the 



Summer in Arcady 151 

marriage ceremony performed that night, and 
the necessity of her being left alone with him 
in a strange place. To this last thought was 
linked a new fear of herself and of him that 
had been aroused during the last hour ; for 
Nature had stolen treacherously nigh them 
both, as is her sad, sad wont with her human 
children. And with this fear now came again 
the old torturing doubts of him. He was no 
longer even a member of the church, and to 
her mind this was the last thing that made 
her fear that he might not do what was right. 

The moments were flying and he did not 
understand her silence. 

" I thought you loved me ! " he cried angrily, 
with a sting in his tone and his first distrust of 
her. 

She turned upon him one look of reproach 
beyond words. 

And then, as if this doubt of her drove her 
on, she came quickly and laid her hands on 
his shoulders. 

" Promise me if I go with you, Hilary," she 
said very rapidly and incoherently, " promise 



152 Summer in Arcady 

me if I go with you no, give me your word 
of honour ! no, swear to me ! swear by the 
name of your mother, who hates me! swear 
before God ! that you will not that you 
will " 

She took her hands from his shoulders and 
folded them over his forehead, and pressed 
his face back and gazed into his eyes as her 
tears rained down her face. 

" that you will be true to me!" 

If she had been confronted with the women 
who have asked that pledge and with the 
men who have broken it! 

He gave her a look of surprise. 

"There is no need for me to promise," he 
exclaimed, beside himself with joy. "Only 
let us make haste. It is almost too late ! " 
and he would have led her away. 

She recoiled with a cry of astonishment. 
He turned back to her speechless. She made 
one little gesture with her hand: 

" Promise swear ! " 

"You love me and do not trust me?" he 
asked roughly. As if there are not always in the 



Summer in Arcady 153 

world women who love men well enough to die 
for them and doubt them enough to kill them. 

"Will you promise? Will you swear?" 

" You have no right to ask it," he cried 
hotly, aroused to resist her with all his strength. 
For no matter what such a man s past may 
have been, he wishes to be taken by the 
woman he loves as he takes her. 

" You ask all this of me ? " she replied, " and 
you are not willing to give me any pledge 
any ? " 

" If you could not trust me without one, 
what would it be worth if I gave it?" he ex 
claimed more passionately still. 

Her hands dropped at her sides, then with 
another slight gesture of dismissal she turned 
homeward, saying faintly : 

" I will not go with you ! " 

He sprang before her. 

" Daphne," he cried, breaking completely 
down, " I will promise ! I will promise you 
anything ! " 

She searched his face sorrowfully and then 
gave him her hand. 



154 Summer in Arcady 

"Ah, but you should have promised at first," 
she said with great gentleness, and her tears 
flowed again. 

" If we are to go, we must be going ! " he 
implored. 

"Yes! if we are to go, we must be going," 
she answered sadly ; and then realizing that 
the last moment of her girlhood had come, 
that love was leading her on into the un 
known, that every other human tie was fall 
ing away from her, and that she might be 
tempted beyond her strength, with a sudden 
turning to the fortress of her religion, she 
sank upon her knees and pulled him down 
before her. 

"Here, on your knees," she said, shaken 
by her sobs, "give me your solemn oath, 
Hilary before God, who sees us and will 
judge us for what we do that wherever we 
are together whatever may happen to us 
you will be true to me . . . true to me . . . 
true to me ! " 

" I swear ! " he said, his eyes filling, " God 
helping me, I will be true to you ! " 



XV 

THE broad, lofty plateau of Middle Kentucky 
where the rich farm lands lie sinks slowly 
westward to the Ohio. There the great tawny 
river throws a caressing arm around the com 
ing hills, dividing the South from the North. 

At a certain point on the river bank these 
verdurous hills jut out against the southern 
sky like the fragments of enormous emeralds. 
Along the base of them stretches the old 
town of Maysville. Opposite, on the Ohio 
side, lies the old village of Aberdeen hardly 
more than a quiet hamlet. A ferry plies 
between. 

Here in early days was a great historic 
crossing, a pathway of primeval travel, a water 
way of southward moving civilization, a gate 
way of northwestern war; and here for three- 
quarters of a century, until a few years ago, the 
fleeing couples of Kentucky escaped from the 
55 



156 Summer in Arcady 

State to be married by the squires on the other 
side. 

It was late that night. The spirit of the in 
finite and the divine seemed to brood through 
out the universe. In Nature reigned only the 
law of beauty and of peace. 

The moon hung on the violet walls of the 
sky like a broken shield of beaten gold hung 
there as if to be at rest from the clangour of 
arms forevermore. The stars burned as great 
cathedral tapers, freshly lighted for some 
chaste processional of the soul. The air, 
blowing from the south through the rifts in 
the emerald hills, brought with it the thoughts 
of quiet meadows far away, of noiseless hemp 
and corn, of cattle drowsing in the deep, cool 
grass near some silvering flake of water. The 
river rolled on in curves of light, unbroken by 
keel or oar, the ferry-man asleep. Only some 
glowing window in the town betrayed the 
watchful or the sleepless ; and once in a 
dark alley the voices of a man and a woman 
parting in a doorway the locking of the 
door, and the sounds of his feet hurrying un- 



Summer in Arcady 157 

steadily away jarred rudely upon the thought 
that all things were at rest under the wing of 
darkness and in the beauty of holiness. 

Suddenly a skiff shot out from the Kentucky 
bank a little way above the town and started 
in a slanting line across the river. In the 
stern sat two figures. 

As the boat passed out into the mighty 
current, whether filled with the fear of it and 
of what was coming, or chilled by the cooler 
wind that blew on her she had on a thin 
dress and had no wrap the girl shivered. 
The boy took off his coat and, folding it about 
her shoulders, drew it softly across her bosom 
and buttoned it under her throat. 

"You must not get cold," he said, bending 
over her. She looked up at him gratefully. 

" Don t take off your coat," she said. " You 
will catch cold. Please don t for my sake." 

" Oh, I m warm," he replied carelessly. 

All the afternoon, from the moment of their 
starting, the new reverence with which he 
treated her put her in new awe of him. As she 
nestled into the coat and the warmth of his 



158 Summer in Arcady 

body passed into hers, she slipped one of her 
hands down between his burning palms. 

Far out in the stream the powerful young 
fellow at the oars addressed them, being tired 
of the silence. 

" You re not the first couple I ve taken over 
to-day. I rowed one over just after sundown. 
We hadn t more than shoved off when her 
father was down on them. He walked quietly 
down to the edge of the river and levelled his 
shot-gun and said : Come back ! But the 
young fellow in the boat, he moved away from 
his girl, and then he said to me just as quietly : 
You go on!" 

When the boat had been run ashore and 
they had gotten out, he stepped up to Hilary, 
for whom he had conceived a liking. 

"I reckon you ll need me for a witness," 
he said. 

" Witness ! Do we have to have witnesses ? " 

"Of course." 

"How many?" 

"Two." 

" Do you know where I can get another ? " 



Slimmer in Arcady 159 

"Maybe I can pick up one as we go along. 
Maybe we can get one at the hotel next door 
to the squire s." 

Their voices were as low and grave as 
though they had been arranging the details 
of a military execution. The three walked 
through the moonlit village in silence. There 
was not a sound anywhere. On the farther 
edge of it in a street leading back in the 
country, they stopped before a large two-story 
house. Old maple-trees stood in front of it 
on the sidewalk, covering it now with shifting 
light and shadow. On one side was a yard 
and in the yard stood old apple-trees. From 
under one of the apple-trees came the low 
sound of a fife. 

"That s the squire," said the oarsman. " He 
is used to being up at all hours of the night. 
Wait here." 

He entered the yard gate. Soon the sound 
of the fife ceased. Then followed the sound 
of feet passing into the house from a back 
porch ; then the noise of feet inside ; and then 
the front door was opened, and in the doorway, 



160 Summer in Arcady 

holding a lamp high over his head, stood a lean, 
wrinkled, old man with short white hair, heavy, 
circling eyebrows over vivacious, sunken eyes, 
and the general demeanour of a firm and polite 
Frenchman. 

" Come in," he said simply. 

They walked into the parlour. He went back 
into the hall, with a nod to Hilary. 

"The fee is five dollars," he said. 

Hilary thrust his hand into his pocket and 
drew out two dollars and some change. 

"I didn t know I was coming. This is all 
I have. But I can send it." 

The squire took the two dollars from his 
palm and reentered the parlour. 

"Are you ready?" he said. 

The oarsman had come in, bringing with 
him the keeper of the hotel. Hilary walked 
over to where Daphne sat on a chair holding 
her hat and her handkerchief in her hand. He 
took her by the other hand and drew it inside 
his arm. 

The squire stepped before them. He spoke 
in the tone in which a witness is sworn in a 
court-room. 



Summer in Arcady 161 

" Marriage is a solemn ordinance, instituted 
by an all-wise Being for the happiness of man 
and woman. It is a solemn pledge, or contract, 
entered into by the parties, which is to continue 
through life. 

"Join your hands. 

" Each of you do solemnly promise that you 
will love, honour, and obey each other as a duti 
ful husband and wife ; and, forsaking all others, 
cleave to each other alone until it shall please 
Almighty God to separate you by death. To 
this do you both agree ? " 

There was silence. Each waited for the 
other to speak. 

" To this do you both agree ? " repeated the 
squire sharply. 

Hilary shifted his weight heavily from one 
foot to the other. 

"I do ! " he said, in a thick, nervous tone. 

"I do ! " said Daphne, in a low, trembling 
voice, with an effort to give some dignity to 
her vow, but with a pathetic sense also of how 
alone she was among those strange men and 
of how unlike all this was to a wedding. 
M 



1 62 Summer in Arcady 

"In the presence of Almighty God and 
these witnesses present, by authority vested 
in me, I now pronounce you husband and 
wife." 

The hotel-keeper stepped forward. 

"Your room will be ready when you come 
over," he said, and went out. 

The oarsman, who had not been able to keep 
his eyes from Daphne s face since they had 
come into the light of the room, stepped for 
ward and shook hands with rough warmth. 

" Partner ! " he said to Hilary, " I ll change 
boats with you ! " 

Then he, too, went out : nothing had been 
said about paying him. 

The squire had opened a writing-desk of a 
pattern ancient and now little seen : with 
quaint drawers and upright shelves, and many 
pigeon-holes. He had taken his seat before 
this, and was unrolling a sheet of paper nearly 
covered with closely written names. Other 
sheets and numerous little rolls of paper of a 
few inches square some of them yellow and 
crumpled and covered with dust, and all of 






Summer in Arcady 163 

them filled with names bulged from the 
pigeon-holes, and were crammed away between 
the upright shelves. 

There they were the rolls of the secret 
marriages of the people of Kentucky. Thou 
sands upon thousands of couples. Many of 
them not much more than children, sometimes 
one couple a day, sometimes three or four. A 
long, gay pageant : some less gay than others, 
being desperately pursued; some less gay, not 
being guiltless; some most sorrowfully bent 
upon the office of having the marriage per 
formed and the date of it set back for the 
sake of the poor little life soon to appear 
in the world. In quick succession the fugi 
tives trod upon each other when Nature had 
begun to inflame the earth in the mornings 
of May and June ; or in the languishing 
noons of autumn, during the season of rural 
fairs ; or later still, when the wine was ready 
to burst the grape, and when the first fire on 
the hearth stirred in the blood the desire of 
human warmth during the long winter nights. 

If Daphne had but known, hidden away on 



164 Summer in Arcady 

one of those yellow sheets were the names of 
her own father and mother. 

"Your names and ages," said the squire. 
" And where do you live ? " 

" Hilary , aged nineteen, Bourbon County, 

Kentucky." 

"Daphne , aged seventeen, Fayette 

County, Kentucky." 

The squire wrote down the words, added 
the date and the amount of the fee, and laid 
a blotter on what he had written. Then ris 
ing, he led the way to the front door. 

" Good-night ! " he said politely, and turned 
the key on them. 

They stood as in a dream under the shadows 
of the old maples and looked around them. A 
light fell out upon the sidewalk from a door of 
the house adjoining, and a man was waiting on 
the steps. 

" This way," he said. 

They went over and followed him into the 
parlour. 

" Have you had any supper ? " he asked, 

"We ve had supper," said Hilary, 



Summer in Arcady 165 

"Can I do anything for you?" He looked 
from one to the other. Hilary glanced cov 
ertly at Daphne. 

" No ! " she said quickly, and turned away 
from both of them. 

"You ll find your room at the head of 
the stairs, when you get ready to go up," 
he said. "Take this lamp with you. Good 
night." 

He went out, but came back and thrust in 
his head. 

"You can lock the front door," he said to 
Hilary, significantly. 

It was all over now the life of peril and 
unrest from which they had barely escaped 
with its tossing nights, its wistful, heartsore 
days, its ungovernable yearnings. 

An awkward, embarrassed silence fell upon 
them the moment they were left alone. Daphne 
turned to a picture of the squire, that hung over 
the mantelpiece. From that she passed to a 
window, opening upon the rear of the yard, 
and stood for a little while, looking out trem- 



1 66 Summer in Arcady 

blingly at the grass and the trees, silvered with 
moonlight. Then she sank upon a small, stiff 
chair, and dropping her eyes on her lap, began 
passing her fingers slowly, mechanically, around 
her handkerchief, going from corner to corner, 
corner to corner. 

Across the room Hilary had sat down by the 
table, on which stood the small dim lamp, and 
had picked up the photograph album. The 
pictures ran : grandfather, grandmother ; father, 
mother ; then the children from the oldest 
down to the latest born. There was a portrait 
of a young mother clasping an infant trium 
phantly to her breast. There was another of a 
rustic young husband with his bride on his arm, 
and with a smile on his face that was like a 
challenge to the beholder to do anything better 
in life than that or be anything better him 
self, if he could. Then came relatives and 
friends with a few places at the back of the 
album for scattering and less valued acquaint 
ances. 

He went through them all from beginning to 
end, confusedly, never once lifting his eyes. 



Summer in Arcady 167 

His hand was shaking, his face was flushed, 
and his tongue was palsied. 

The hour had come to him when, of all that 
can ever come to man, he feels that he must 
begin a new life and when he would like to be 
gin it as one newly born ; when his old past 
rises against him ; when, if there is anything 
decent and manly surviving in him still, he is 
overwhelmed with some sense of the awful gift 
that love has brought into his unworthy life, 
a pure woman. 

The great heights were never to be for 
Hilary. His ancestors, his companions, Nature, 
his own temperament and limitations, had ap 
pointed him his poor rough place far lower 
down ; but if there ever descended upon him 
any rays of that divine light of the spirit which 
also rests upon such a union ; if there ever 
reached him any fresh vision of the real manli 
ness of what is right ; these intimations from 
the wisdom of everlasting law, from the per 
petuity of the species, and from the growing, 
triumphing movement of the world, conquered 
him and crushed him now. 



1 68 Slimmer in Arcady 

The album slipped from his hands to 
the table. He started, and stole a look at 
her. 

The moonlight, streaming through the win 
dow, rested upon her bare, lovely head, and 
upon one side of her face. He could see how 
white it was, how frightened, how appealing in 
its loneliness : a child his wife awaiting his 
will submissive. 

A new feeling of protecting tenderness rose 
in him for her ; and with a quick, deep breath 
he started up and went over, and took both her 
hands softly in his and stood before her, look 
ing reverently down at her. 

" Will you go up now, Daphne ? " he said, 
in a low tone. "It is so late, and you must 
sleep." 

Her head dropped forward a little lower. 

"Go, dearest," and his hands gathered them 
selves about hers with the strong, true pressure 
of a promise. 

She lifted her face to him. 

"You go with me," she whispered. "I m 
afraid." 



Summer in Arcady 169 

He turned to the lamp solemnly, and led the 
way. When he reached the door, he glanced 
back. She sat still in the chair. 

"Come on," he said, with something in his 
voice that drew her irresistibly to him. 

She rose and began to follow. But when 
she reached the foot of the stair, she stopped, 
faint and trembling, and watched him as he 
went slowly up. How heavy his tread was, 
how large his limbs were, how broad his back 
looked with the lamplight close in front of it ! 
There was a pitiful fear of him in her eyes, 
and her bosom rose and fell with her quiver 
ing breath. 

But at last she was happy and at peace : he 
was hers. The old, troublesome, uncertain life 
with him in the meadows, now so far away, at 
the picnic, in the pasture, was at an end. 
Girlhood, too, was at an end now ; and with a 
certain new pity of herself she recalled the day 
when, careless and free, she had walked home 
across the fields in the warmth of early June, 
and had paused to hear him singing in the 
corn. 



170 Summer in Arcady 

He reached the top of the stairs and, turning, 
raised the lamp above his head. But when he 
looked down and saw her at the bottom, he 
came back down the stairs and put his arm 
closely around her and they went up together. 



THE END 



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"One of the most conspicuously brilliant, and at the same 
time thoroughly humane and sympathetic, treatments of social 
reform and reformers that has been written." Literary World. 

" A book that those who look for the best in current litera 
ture ought not to leave unread." The Beacon. 

" It is a nice piece of literary workmanship." 

The Book Buyer. 

" It is a message, not from a dreamer, but from a woman who 
has both thought and felt, a message spoken with a man s 
grasp of facts and a woman s grace of tenderness." 

Public Opinion. 

" Skilfully drawn, with firm, delicate touches, and the whole 
lighted by the most delicious little flickers of humour." 

The Wave. 

MACMILLAN & CO., 

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK. 



THE IRIS SERIES OF ILLUSTRATED NOVELS. 



TRYPHENA IN LOVE. 

By WALTER RAYMOND, 

Author of " Love and Quiet Life," etc. 
Illustrated by J. WALTER WEST. i6mo. Cloth. 75 cents. 

" Fresh and quaint and wholesome as the scent of the homely 
flowers." London Daily News. 

" Mr. Raymond is a born painter of pastoral peace and life." 

The Outlook. 

" Tryphena is a true charmer, natural as nature itself, yet 
daintily delicate as a dream." Boston Courier. 

"A veritable treasure." Munsey s Magazine. 

" As sweetly homely as the good red clover, as wholesome as 
an apple reddened on the sunny side o the wall, as simply loyal 
and tender as a right old ballad song." Boston Transcript. 



A LOST ENDEAVOUR. 

By GUY BOOTHBY, 

Author of " A Bid for Fortune," etc. 
Illustrated by STANLEY L. WOOD. i6mo. Cloth. 75 cents. 

" Mr. Boothby is rapidly winning a name and place for him 
self as a writer of stories full of the magic of the Pacific." 

" Mr. Boothby knows how to write a story of thrilling inter 
est." Kansas City Times. 

" When the tale stops, you are in the full flood of an inter 
est which might easily be maintained through as many pages 
more." N. Y. Tribune. 

"The story holds the interest to the end." The Critic. 



MACMILLAN & CO., 

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK. 



THE IRIS SERIES OF ILLUSTRATED NOVELS. 



MAUREEN S FAIRING. 

By JANE BARLOW, 

Author of " Irish Idylls," etc. 
Illustrated by BERTHA NEWCOMBE. i6mo. Cloth. 75 cents. 

"It is doubtful if a more exquisite collection of stories of Irish 
peasant life has ever been written." Boston Daily Advertiser. 
"Nothing more delightfully fresh and unpretentious." 

Clevelander. 

" Like a cool shower on the face." Boston Courier. 
" There is not a dull page in the book." 

Christian Intelligencer. 

"Keeps tears and laughter in close warfare from first to 
last." Denver Republican. 



A MODERN MAN. 

By ELLA MACMAHON, 

Author of " A New Note," etc. 
Illustrated by IDA LOVERING. i6mo. Cloth. 75 cents. 

" It is a simple story, but pleasingly told." Boston Times. 

"The same general ingredients, mixed in different propor 
tions, will make a variety of confections. The ingredients of 
this novel are by no means new, but they are well mixed, and 
the result is a readable book." New York Observer. 

" It grows in movement and interest with each chapter." 

Clevelander. 

"The style is smooth, and the summer atmosphere of the 
story very pleasing." Minneapolis Tribune. 

" Will be read with unalloyed pleasure." 

Boston Home Journal. 

" It is all a charming story." Boston Courier. 



MACMILLAN & CO., 

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK. 



THE IRIS SERIES OF ILLUSTRATED NOVELS. 

A RINGBY LASS, 

And Other Stories. 

By MARY BEAUMONT. 

Illustrated by J. WALTER WEST. i6mo. Cloth. 75 cents. 

"A daintily choice collection, forming an exquisite literary 
bouquet." Boston Courier. 

"These tales have a sweet and enchanting simplicity and 
pathos which win the heart of the reader." N. Y. Observer. 

"Not only clear and bright, but also displays a perfectly 
healthy and happy temperament." The Churchman. 

" They are original, clearly told, and of unusual power." 

Buffalo Express. 

" Particularly pleasing, ... is full of charm and freshness." 

St. Pa^^l Pioneer Press. 



WHERE HIGHWAYS CROSS. 

By J. S. FLETCHER, 

Author of " When Charles the First was King." 
With illustrations. i6mo. Cloth. 75 cents. 

" A most acceptable story, admirably sketched." 

Boston Commonwealth. 

" An honest, hearty, homely, healthy English tenant people s 
story." Boston Courier. 

"Abounds with vivid descriptions of events and persons. 
The sentiment of the book is wholesome." Christian Register. 

"The story is well told, and will easily rank with the best 
fiction of the year." N. Y. Commercial Advertiser. 



MACMILLAN & CO., 

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK. 



THE IRIS SERIES OF ILLUSTRATED NOVELS. 



LIVES THAT CAME TO NOTHING. 

By GARRET LEIGH, 

Author of " The Burning Mist," etc. 
With Illustrations by IDA LOVERINQ. i6mo. Cloth. 75 cents. 

" The brightest story ... in wit and satire toned by literary 
and musical culture and human feeling." Boston Globe. 



CHRISTIAN AND LEAH, 

and Other Ghetto Stories. 
By LEOPOLD KOMPERT. 

TRANSLATED BY ILLUSTRATED BY 

ALFRED S. ARNOLD. F. HAMILTON JACKSON. 

Cloth. Price 75 cents. 

" This book contains those Jewish stories, which are extremely 
simple, but full of the eloquence of truth and nature." 

New York Observer. 

"The portrayal of Jewish life in these stories is wonderfully 
fine in detail and vivid in colouring, and not only in the de 
lineation of character, but in the expression of the higher 
ethical motives, does this book make its appeal to the sym 
pathetic mind." The Beacon. 

"The three tales form an exceptionally fine opinion of the 
Ghetto realm of fiction, which has come into such wide favour 
of late." Boston Courier. 



MACMILLAN & CO., 

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK. 










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